To makes Emacs popular again, the core team needs to realize that their actual competitors are desktop environments, window managers, and automation tools rather than text editors and IDEs at this point. Programmers know what they want in an editor--the general populace doesn't (beyond a bare minimum of having it work like Google Docs or Microsoft Word). Emacs doesn't need to change at all, it just needs tools that go a few levels deeper in its philosophy. That is to say, first make Emacs capable of controlling non-Emacs GUIs and piloting web browsers. Second, improve automation tooling that so that individuals can make and share no-code macros for simple tasks. EXWM, an Emacs-based window manager has already taken a great first step towards accomplishing this.

Emacs is a keyboard macro editor stuck in a mouseless era where Lisp Enlightenment was still a thing. It's great, but it's niche. Most people don't actually want or need that (or to be more specific, they don't know that they need or want it).

The way to directly grow the user-base is to get the general population on board Emacs first, then evangelize for the idea underlying open software afterwards.

You do that by solving the problems that they already have more efficiently than their present solutions. Org-mode really nailed it in this department. I switched to Emacs for org-mode, but stayed for vanilla Emacs and EXWM. If Emacs were just Emacs, I'd probably be using a different editor. Without definitive hooks, Emacs is esoteric, opaque, and frightening to the general population, if they know about Emacs at all besides vim's evil rival. They just don't need Emacs in its current state.

What they do need is something that makes it trivial to automate the dumb and repetitive tasks that they have to do every day on a computer using a browser. This is no longer shell or plaintext processing for the majority of non-IT users. It's interfacing with GUIs. They need middleware to automate interfacing with kludgy enterprise software. They need middleware to speed up internet browsing.

If Emacs were a blank slate project today, fulfilling the same type of needs, I could see it being a mashup of EXWM, Selenium, and AutoIt. Its killer features would be a guarantee that the same controls (that the user selected from a common set e.g. Microsoft Word, Firefox, Vim, Emacs, etc.) worked functioned between applications. Having the ability to record mouse and keyboard macros without ever needing to see a line of code, but also providing the ability to drive using the DOM, OCR, or whatever niche smart interface is needed would be a second killer feature. These coupled with the already standard Emacs and EXWM features would attract a ton of new users that would actually have a compelling reason to learn how to use it and then later adopt to the Emacs paradigm.

EXWM is already 70% of the way for a minimum viable product for something like this. It just needs to be bundled with more mature macro tooling beyond 90s relics like xdotool and xautomation along with a distro with sane defaults. Having a single abstraction layer to control everything from userland on through web platforms would be a dream for accessibility and returning a semblance of control to users.