You're absolutely right that you pay a price for using Emacs, and that not having some awesome IDE features is part of that price.
Another part is having to look for and install the third-party modules that make it actually work well (most of them are not included in Emacs because of Stallman and the FSF being ideologues).
As you say, keeping it updated and not broken is yet another part of the price.
That said, it's clear from your comment that you have not given Emacs a serious try, at least not recently.
There's no reason you have to, but you probably shouldn't complain about it so vociferously if you haven't.
Right-click menus that cover most use cases (jump to def, find references, format code, etc) are absolutely a thing with lsp-mode (which is not too hard to set up itself - install it via the built-in package installation UI, install language servers, and tell emacs to use lsp-mode in programming languages).
There are unit testing modes that kick off tests automatically on changes and let you know if everything passed (or give you a list of failures when some tests didn't). I've not used those myself so I can't speak to their quality, but they definitely exist.
Further, these tools work for a wide array of languages, with the exact same interface for all of them (and an incredibly discoverable, extensible one).
Some of us like that a lot, as well as the comfort of having all the code to reproduce our setup directly to hand. I probably have several more decades in this game, so losing my environment to an IDE company going broke or getting bought is not a pleasant thought.
Tradeoffs, for sure, but with valid arguments for both sides.
Another part is having to look for and install the third-party modules that make it actually work well (most of them are not included in Emacs because of Stallman and the FSF being ideologues).
As you say, keeping it updated and not broken is yet another part of the price.
That said, it's clear from your comment that you have not given Emacs a serious try, at least not recently.
There's no reason you have to, but you probably shouldn't complain about it so vociferously if you haven't.
Right-click menus that cover most use cases (jump to def, find references, format code, etc) are absolutely a thing with lsp-mode (which is not too hard to set up itself - install it via the built-in package installation UI, install language servers, and tell emacs to use lsp-mode in programming languages).
There are unit testing modes that kick off tests automatically on changes and let you know if everything passed (or give you a list of failures when some tests didn't). I've not used those myself so I can't speak to their quality, but they definitely exist.
Further, these tools work for a wide array of languages, with the exact same interface for all of them (and an incredibly discoverable, extensible one).
Some of us like that a lot, as well as the comfort of having all the code to reproduce our setup directly to hand. I probably have several more decades in this game, so losing my environment to an IDE company going broke or getting bought is not a pleasant thought.
Tradeoffs, for sure, but with valid arguments for both sides.