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.
A huge portion of the emacs community seems resistant to any UI improvement. I think it's a counterculture thing.
It’s not counterculture. It’s understanding of what’s important. Functionality, discoverability and extendability over opinionated UI/UX that nobody asked for.