Emacs is definitely ugly and antiquated. It has terrible curb appeal. But unlike any "pretty" software I've ever used, if one sticks with Emacs long enough, sweating bullets to learn its odd ways of doing things and customizing it, there comes a point where you suddenly realize it's reading your mind. After that, it's impossible to imagine getting work done on computers without Emacs.
Yes, a common reaction, until newbies (like myself) find configurations like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs and come to realize the opposite. For myself it's only missing a slightly better "rending experience" like VSCode.
I love Spacemacs but due to varying configurations per build on different OS' Emacs either doesnt work at all OOTB with Spacemacs for me, or it works just enough to show up broken. Without cross-platform consistency I'm better off using Neovim + Spacevim which sometimes fails on me due to fonts, but its less broken.
I tried both of them and just gave up. Emacs for me has nothing on a modern IDE and a light weight vim config for file editing. When it comes to reading email, browsers are far better option.