I haven't heard of the decline or rise of the popularity of emacs, but from personal experience it is holding up quite well!

I think par-edit is superb for anyone building stuff in some lisp dialect. org-mode is unbeatable and I saw quite a few stories on reddit of people getting drawn to emacs because of org-mode. Recently I picked up rust development and the rust-mode is working very well for me, much better than VSCode or the Intellij plugin.

Around university I see many lecturers using emacs too.