Here's a new user perspective on Emacs (based on memory; I actually have more experience than this):

I open emacs-gtk. A document is already loaded. I try to type something, and every letter I type gives the unhelpful error message "[letter] is undefined". I guess this means I need to create a new document first. I open the File menu, and see "Visit New File...". "Visit" sounds weird, and the "..." is suspicious, but at least it has "New" in it, so I pick that. It opens a file picker, so "Visit New File..." must be Emacs slang for "Open...", and there is apparently no "New" functionality in the File menu. There's also an "Open File..." menu item too for some mysterious reason, but that's obviously not what I want, so I ignore it.

I check the Help menu. This has 19 (!) top level options, none of which are obviously correct, and one of which is "Emacs Psychotherapist". I click that one out of curiosity. It replaces the starting document without warning and there's no obvious way to get it back. I'm presented with more Emacs slang. I assume "RET" means Enter, and that Psychotherapist must be a Microsoft Clippy clone.

I type "new document", hoping it will search the documentation. I immediately notice the scroll bar flickering. This draws my attention to the incorrect size of the drag handle. I click the empty space below the drag handle, which moves the drag handle but doesn't actually affect the text. I drag the drag handle back up, which makes the text glitch out for a moment, but otherwise does nothing.

I press "RET" twice, and get "Why do you say new document?" I then realize that it's actually an Eliza clone not a Clippy clone, and I've wasted my time. I give up on trying to create a new file, and just Open an existing one. I immediately notice the cursor is an ugly inverse video cursor instead of a normal thin line cursor. I press and hold the down arrow key, and notice that scrolling moves in big jumps instead of line-by-line. It also forcibly moves the cursor. It seems the cursor lives in screen space like it's still the 1970s and I'm using a hardware terminal. There is no obvious way to keep its position in the document while you navigate somewhere else. Despite this, Page Up cannot move the cursor to the beginning of the document like it should. Page Down works though.

I assume that, like every modern text editor, there's a "Find in This Document..." feature bound to Control-F for easy navigation. There's not: Control-F is bound to right arrow. Presumably this made sense 40 years ago. There is not even any Find functionality in the Edit menu, which you'd think would be core functionality for any text editor.

In the course of this experimentation, I notice that merely moving the mouse cursor over the scroll bar is enough to make it flicker. I hold the scroll down button with the mouse. It actually does scroll, but extremely slowly, averaging about one line per second. The timing is inconsistent, and the CPU usage is strangely high.

I type something, and notice that there is no visual indication that the document now contains unsaved changes, such an asterisk in the title bar, or a dot on the Save icon. I press Control-S to save, which doesn't save, and instead triggers the Find function I was looking for. I decide that "Modern Emacs" is a hopeless quest and give up in favor of something written this century.