"Sane defaults" is a thing, but the sanity supporting the defaults changes every couple of decades.

E.g., re the GP's complaint about lack of CUA: CUA is an IBM effort to standardize a dozen shortcuts that are considered more or less universally useful.

But Emacs predates CUA by a couple of decades, and supports easy access to an insanely wider (two, three orders of magnitude) space of functionality.

If you want CUA, Notepad is 100% conformant.

Disclaimer: Yes I would adore a clean pure new Emacs, but given the dearth of Stallmans, the new Emacs would take even longer to not have CUA by default.