And the alternative for people like me, who just want to avoid too much Ctrl pressing sometimes, without fully comitting to the "mode" experience, is god-mode[1].
While you enable it (usually by pressing Esc), Ctrl is "assumed" to be always pressed, so saving a file becomes "x s" (though when I am on Mac, I always map Cmd+S to save - and many other Cmd key based shortcuts that I used in every other app - thanks to emacs built-in shortcuts almost never using the Cmd key as it was designed for Unix).
It made using emacs much more enjoyable for me.