why do so many things depend on emacs?

recently i installed something (probably Macaulay2) which added emacs desktop entries. i uninstalled macaulay2 when i no longer needed it and the emacs desktop entries remained. i was confused because i thought emacs was installed just as a dependency for macaulay2. then i looked at the dependency graph.

apparently inkscape and gedit both depend on emacs. i cannot for the life of me figure out why. i don't really need either so i uninstalled both.

disclaimer: i have nothing at all against emacs. i am genuinely just curious how emacs has entered the dependency graph for so many applications that by all rights don't need it.