What's the "Golden Client" for 2026?

I've been using Emby as the backbone of my home theater for over 10 years and it's served me well. My current setup uses Kodi (via LibreElec) on an Intel HTPC as the Emby client and a Roku Ultra as my streaming platform. That decade-old HTPC is still an HD-beast, but it struggles with 4K and quakes with fright as the mere hint of AV1. It's time to update.

When I originally setup my theater, Kodi was definitely the golden standard when it came to Emby front-ends. Indeed, the usability is top-notch -- smooth playback; instant response; great pass-through; and excellent fast-forward and reverse. Plus awesome integration with HA. But it's integration with Emby does require another step and sync and such and every so often things will just break and it's not guaranteed that I'll get back to what I had before when I fix it. Case in point, as I write this, some (but not all) of my media groups in Kodi are just colored folders with text and not images. That just happens sometimes.

So if I'm going to be updating my setup, I want to get the absolute top-of-the-line golden Emby client for the next decade. I would prefer it to be a first-party client and not a "proxy" (of sorts) like with Kodi... but if Kodi is still the best of the best, then that's fine. Ideally it would have the usability of Kodi but the stability of a first-party client.

Theater specs if it matters: 7.4.1 speakers; 4K projector; AVR with Dolby Atmos/Vision, HD10, etc; controlled via Harmony (soon directly from Home Assistant).

What do y'all think? What should be my theater front-end for the _next_ decade?