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.
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There's no such thing as an Emacs "look". Its appearance, UI and UX, are wildly different depending on how the user wants it to look and behave. Considering that it is a very configurable system that happens to expose building blocks for a text editor, every Emacs installation is thus different from another.
We could say that the Emacs GUI toolkit and perhaps its internals are dated by modern standards, but even those would be personal preferences. Being single-threaded is arguably holding it back in some aspects, though that isn't a major limitation for most use cases.
The single threaded issue is a problem, but one that can be somewhat worked around. I consider emac's bad deals an existential issue that significantly hurts adoption.
But those are not the users who choose Emacs in the first place. Emacs is made for customization.
Besides, there are many preconfigured distributions of it, such as the one discussed here, which can effectively be used as the defaults, if you don't like the ones shipped OOB.
> I consider emac's bad deals an existential issue that significantly hurts adoption.
Well, I reckon you're wrong. Emacs in all of its incarnations has been in use for nearly half a century, and its adoption has never been greater. Some people will point to low percentages in developer surveys, but that is the wrong metric to focus on. Its usage will never reach mainstream numbers, which is probably for the best, but it will continue to be enjoyed by enthusiastic users for a long time to come.