As someone who recently picked up emacs (as in the past couple of years), I actually didn't find it that overwhelming. I'm not sure what "modernize" means in this sense, but other than trying to remember some fairly arcane key combos, it's a fairly straightforward system. Certainly no more difficult to grok that vim's modal system. If a user is new, start with the tutorial and get a feel for the navigation. Then I watched a few videos online to help me with more advanced stuff. After that point, Google was my friend if I needed to do something specific.

That said, I feel like emacs could update a few defaults and include a few packages to create less setup time. Like shipping an official starter package (dnf install emacs-starter) so people can choose what they want.