You apparently missed the explosion in Emacs activity in the 2010s. I, too, remember using Emacs in the early millennium and feeling like a partisan of one powerful but nevertheless unpopular editor, with an uncertain future. But once the Mastering Emacs blog, Org-Mode, and Sacha Chua came along, suddenly there were so many new packages to install and tips for one's own config, and things like the pure-gtk build brought UI improvements going beyond merely look and feel.

In the early millennium, I as a Emacs user had hardly anyone to actually talk about Emacs with, even on nerd hangouts like Slashdot or the dedicated Freenode channel. Since the 2010s, one can make oneself practically a whole social life around Emacs.