In terms of GUI interaction speed and input latency, Zed imho is better. Just see for yourself the first 2 minutes of their showcase video [1]. They have written their own abstraction layer (GPUI) over Apple's Metal (I'm not sure whether that is portable to Vulkan, DirectX 12 or not). And what is Emacs's most performant rendering backend? PGTK is recently gaining traction.
I haven’t tried hard with Zed because last time I took a serious go at it (roughly 4-6 months ago) it didn’t have a great story for remote machines.
If you’re doing production work, sooner or later your laptop won’t have the same GPU as the target. At that point an editor without a remote facility becomes an accessory.
If you’re on a Mac, there is an NVIDIA target these days. You have to be able to edit code next to the card.
Helix is really great. It’s so nice to not require screenfuls of configuration. And Emacs Lisp fans will feel right at home when the Scheme plugin system lands
It's a good editor, if modal is your thing. Requests in the past to add immediate-style editing capabilities have basically stated it won't/can't happen.
I take great care with my VSCode extensions and their configuration. I likewise take great care with neovim and having it set up properly.
Modern Emacs Lisp is easily the best environment among my daily drivers for interacting with my editor in real time.
Of anything modern I only know Zed a little: Zed in theory might be better than Emacs.
Outside of maybe Zed, which I haven’t mastered, Emacs Lisp is bar nothing the best tool-making tool for serious hackers.