> I do believe that evil-mode is fundamentally just an emulation layer, and shouldn't be regarded as an equal to the regular keybindings.

With all due respect, that's rather condescending and an example of the kind of myopia that religious adherents of both emacs and vi get accused of. fundamentally both emacs' native keybindings and vi keybindings are methods of connecting keyboard events to elisp functions. That's the boring truth, and there's nothing inherently better about one versus the other. Pretending otherwise is just an attempt at gatekeeping.