It's like saying get a new car because the floor mats got dirty, and emacs is in fact a heavy and expensive life change just to edit a text file.

Sure: if you don't spend thousands of hours editing text files, learning emacs would make for an expensive investment. It's a tool for the right use-case.

I spend thousands of hours using computers, especially Linux. Most of my waking weekday hours. Many of us on HN do.