Vim vs Emacs for a Linux sysadmin team - plugin conflict experience

You're spot on about the root cause being architecture, not editors. The plugin manager tip is good advice - lazy-loading by filetype is one of those things that's easy to overlook when you're just adding tools as you need them.

Your point about a shared team config is interesting, though in practice I've found that trying to enforce a single config across both Vim and Emacs users can become its own time sink. Maybe a lighter approach is a shared document that just lists the agreed-upon language servers and versions, so both camps can wire them up independently? That still gets you the "one language client" benefit without the config management headache.