+1. I think it would be very valuable for those involved in developing and maintaining GNU Emacs to regularly try the various 'popular' distributions and to try out other popular alternatives, like VSCode.

Some of the current popular Emacs distributions have some really good stuff and some good ideas, some of which should probably be added into Emacs core or provide guidelines on enhancements/improvements that would make it possible to extend some of these ideas even further. I know that my own personal Emacs config has benefited greatly from doing this - I've based a lot of my setup on ideas I found in some of these distributions and found out about some useful functionality I was not even aware of.

In a similar way, using other editors has also given me ideas for my Emacs setup which has helped as well as some ideas for how I've dealt with some issues in my packages/libs.