In reality it’s like a kid listening to the beatles, but with computers. I’m a younger millennial that grew up entrenched in ‘hacker culture’ and even then there was a clear fetishisation of the good ol’ days.
Not to start a flame war, but no, people use vim and Emacs because they're productive with them. I've certainly tried alternatives like vscode seriously and find I prefer vim.
In my case, it was using Linux distros pre-vscode that got me into emacs. In that era, your choices for general-purpose developer-oriented file editor were (a) emacs, (b) vim, (c) something that was ported from another OS and either running in an emulator or running atop a library stack that barely worked on your architecture and would take like thirty seconds to boot up.
vscode didn't exist when I learned vim, and Visual Studio was only on Windows, and I had seen demonstrated that people using vim seemed to be a lot faster manipulating and navigating code.
