I've come to the conclusion that Emacs is a black hole, and people who profess their love for it in 2023 are likely exhibiting some form of the sunk cost fallacy. Life is too short to spend all your time configuring it.
That said, I don't think you can draw too many conclusions about Emacs from how difficult it is to turn Doom into your own bespoke setup. It abstracts a huge amount, drastically changes default behaviours, and basically needs an entire new ecosystem of Doom compatible packages, of varying quality, to make it work. I often advise that even if people plan to go Doom or Spacemacs, they should spend a week or two trying out vanilla Emacs with their own customisations applied as they go.
Not only do people tend to warn up to them, but even if they still choose to go down the Doom/Spacemacs/Whatever route, they have a better understanding of what's being abstracted away, and how to sometimes glue things back together when something breaks.
Therefore, I dropped Doom Emacs and am very happy with my new clean Emacs config.
Critisizing sophisticated tools though, that's like saying we should go back to drafting tables rather than use autocad because the learning curve is steep. Once you learn the tool it accelerates everything you do.