Thanks for a realistic view! I'm trying out Doom Emacs, per another user's suggestion, and I'm going to try it out for non-code text editing for a while, since I do a lot of that still anyways.
I think some of the magic stems from ubiquitous conventions regarding bindings throughout eMacs. If you use evil mode, the conventions become a little murkier. I’d recommend sticking with the vanilla bindings (I haven’t used Doom, so I’m not actually sure if evil mode is default). This is just my two cents. Doom will be a great introduction either way.