[bitwize]

Really only you can answer that question. If you're curious enough, take a deep dive some weekend and see if Emacs is right for you. As for how bad Emacs Lisp is, it's really only bad compared to other Lisps. And this can be mitigated by enabling lexical scoping and using some of the Common Lisp features that have been ported to Emacs Lisp. It's still a tremendously powerful environment to program in.

That said, I don't really recommend Emacs for new programmers. The reason why is because ecosystem is pretty much the only thing that matters in computing, and the ecosystem has chosen a winner: Visual Studio Code. Your coworkers are likely to be using Visual Studio Code, and it has better support for any non-Lisp programming language than Emacs does, even with Emacs's LSP support. If you want to be productive and efficient as a programmer, Visual Studio Code is hands down the best choice as an editor.

[django77]

This is not necessarily the case for every programming language. Plenty of them are first-class citizens in Emacs and only decent in VS Code, languages like Clojure and Haskell come to mind, and I'm guessing pretty much every LISP.

VS Code is probably a pragmatic choice if you want to start coding right away and don't care about any customization, but if someone is interested in productivity and efficiency, Emacs should be considered (along with other high-performing tools).