I use Emacs Cider for Clojure on Windows, works great.
I prefer to develop in Linux, and I admit that’s where I mostly live, but I do so in coordination with Windows where I also use Emacs for notes and REPL experiments and the likes.
I think it isn’t that Emacs is averse to user interfaces, it’s that its user interface capabilities are very old and hard to change in the implementation, as well as whatever UX is provided it needs to work just as well in command line mode and without a mouse, which restricts what you can use UX for. That’s why there’s no find and replace dialog box for example.
I also disagree with it being just a text editor. It’s actually just a REPL for Emacs Lisp. And it’s only if you like that aspect of it that you’ll like Emacs. Which is where people looking for “just a text editor” might be disappointed.
Now Atom is pretty cool as well, because it is also trying to use the Emacs philosophy to some extent. Being mostly a reifiable Electron app. Unlike VSCode and VIM which aren’t self-modifiable in all aspects, Atom tries to be, similar for Emacs. Atom just drops support for command line and no mouse. And it is built over Electron and JS running interpreted and that makes it slower and more memory demanding than Emacs.
I actually have an Emacs config that gives it 95% of Windows shortcuts. But it turned out it isn’t really the shortcuts that turns off people. It is much more the keyboard driven command line aspect of Emacs being an Emacs lisp REPL.
That’s because if you think of the standard Windows short-cuts, they are just inefficient for doing everything without the mouse. So you still need to learn a lot of additional keyboard gestures and commands to use Emacs, even with all standard Windows shortcuts available.
Anyways, I do think a lot about Emacs could be modernized, but that’s a big effort. And once you get over that initial unfamiliar hump, its really not a big deal, so no one who knows Emacs is motivated to fix that part either. Kind of a weird chicken and egg.