I would really like to see this kind of work be done upstream. Emacs still looks the same as it did decades ago despite other editors advancing and becoming more user friendly.
Yep. Look at IntelliJ. It just copied VsCode when it already had a great UI where things were easy to find and consistent. Now it’s got meaningless icons and hides important stuff by default, making it modern but far worse than before. Thank goodness emacs is not trying to chase the latest and stupidest.