I'm not an old greybeard (in my 20s) and I solely use Emacs. What's "modern tools"? Emacs has everything; with the Language Server Protocol it is exactly like VS Code and the like, with autocomplete, find definitions, native tree-sitter support. It can even read PDFs, images, man/info pages, browse the web. I don't see any advantage that VS Code has over Emacs.
Been using Vim for a few months now but I was checking out eww the other day (along with learning more about emacs in general) and it’s certainly interesting…
PS. Try Doom Emacs and evil-mode:
https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/