Atom is the “spirit” of emacs, taken into a world where your language of choice is Javascript & the runtime is the web browser.

Otherwise, not that I’m aware of. Everyone knows that Elisp is horribly crufty, but getting everyone to shift to a new language requires carrying all the extensions over which is a huge task.

To the point that it makes users of a modern PC in 2017 feel like they have traveled back in time and are using Emacs on a VAX/VMS system.

Yeah, the size of the binary distribution alone is kind of eye-watering. Google Chrome as a runtime is not a small dependency.