In absolute terms, Emacs is more popular than ever. There are folks like Sacha Chua and Prot evangelizing it, and an active community on /r/emacs, the Emacs Wiki, and elsewhere. Not to mention the development and maintenance being done by people hacking on Emacs itself.
This is all about relative popularity, i.e., market share. Microsoft came and ate everyone's lunch in the editor space just like they did in the browser and OS spaces, and now people are assmad. Now the same sort of person who once wanted to turn Linux into a shitty version of Windows (and largely succeeded with GNOME), wants to turn Emacs into a shitty version of Visual Studio Code.
All these proposed changes focus on making Emacs popular, not modern.