To expand on this, each elisp package tends to do one thing and do it well. The majority of my Emacs workflow is basically just a bunch of small, single-purpose elisp programs that get used alongside one another.

Emacs looking like the antithesis of the Unix philosophy is only because the Unix nature is deeply embedded within it.

That hardly describes all of them.

It describes a rather substantial majority of them. There are exceptions, sure, but that changes very little of Emacs' Unix nature.

I think that's stretching the meaning of the philosophy quite a bit.