> ends in either weird hacks or uncomfortable pauses

Not true in practice. It is absolutely useful in real, battle-tested scenarios. If this were a deal-breaking problem, we'd keep seeing it discussed and eventually fixed. Like the issue with long lines, which was a problem in Emacs for decades and is now mitigated. Nobody complains about it anymore.

Lem is very cool, yet too young to be pragmatically compared with the 40-year package ecosystem of Emacs. Let's be honest, with all the "better" stuff, we're not witnessing herds of Lispers switching to it. Another decade may pass before we see it make more than a blip on the radar. Aside from a number of devoted Common Lispers, there's not much usage of it in the real world.

Meanwhile, Emacs is seeing another uptick. First it was Spacemacs, then Doom, now LLMs are making it very appealing, and we see HN submissions every other week. Don't get me wrong, I'm betting on both of these horses, even on Neomacs, and whichever wins, I'd be happy to see it. Emacs for now remains the uncontested king of Lisp-based text editors.