I use emacs regularly (in fact I have it running right now) and I think the complaints against it are perfectly valid. Emacs is awesome in lots of ways, but it also really, really sucks in lots of other ways.

But putting emacs aside, the SBCL tooling seems reasonable to me. The real reason I rarely reach for lisp these days is not the tooling, but because the Common Lisp library ecosystem is a wasteland of partial implementations and abandoned code bases.

It's also been my experience that LLMs are better at writing more mainstream languages, especially "newbie-proof" languages like Go.

In any case, I don't see why one would reach for Allegro or Lispworks over SBCL unless one really enjoys writing lisp by hand and needs specific features they offer that SBCL doesn't. I would imagine those features are vanishingly few.