The big advantage of eLisp is it inherited the capability of changing a running program while it is running from earlier lisps. Schemes, including Racket, generally can't do that.
So with eLisp, it's natural to allow editing config.el and reloading without restarting Emacs. It's possible to do in languages outside the Common Lisp branch of the tree of life. But it's a Turing tarpit. The default is changing a program requires killing the existing instance and restarting. That's fine for a distributed application because there are lots of instances. In a word processor, a single thread is a reasonable abstraction.
Lots of schemes do let you change running programs and elisp doesn’t support the various crazy CLOS things for dealing with instances of classes since redefined.
If scheme where so different from elisp, no one would have bothered trying to make guilemacs yet here we are.
So with eLisp, it's natural to allow editing config.el and reloading without restarting Emacs. It's possible to do in languages outside the Common Lisp branch of the tree of life. But it's a Turing tarpit. The default is changing a program requires killing the existing instance and restarting. That's fine for a distributed application because there are lots of instances. In a word processor, a single thread is a reasonable abstraction.