> Learning emacs and vim from decades old documentation is quite a journey.

Can't speak for Vim, but the Emacs documentation has hardly succumbed to the sort of obsolescence your description of it implies. (It's also built in to the editor, and reachable via M-x info.) You might want to take a look at it, before you go on consigning novices unfortunate enough to heed your bad advice to the hell that is Stack Overflow. (And if you're going to point people in even that general direction, at least point them at Emacs SE, which unlike SO isn't overrun with garbage and lies.)