Are you using evil mode? It seems to be suggested by the spacemacs docs.
spacemacs is for vim users. No one who doesn’t use evil mode uses it. Also most people who use evil-mode probably use spacemacs.
Emacs keybindings are burned into my brain at this point, but if I had to do it again, I would probably go with spacemacs. I think modal editing is probably superior.
I don't use evil-mode (anymore), but I still use Spacemacs. I'm too lazy to configure everything myself (language modes, Helm, Projectile, Magit, etc) so I use Spacemacs as a starting point and load a bunch of extra ELisp on top.
I'd recommend Spacemacs (even if you're not using evil) if you're new to Emacs and want to see how different and powerful a fully customized Emacs is when compared to the bare-bones experience of stock Emacs.
I’ve never used it, but I use prelude. Is spacemacs better?
But overall i prefer Spacemacs to vim for general development.
I recommend using the develop branch of spacemacs. It sometimes breaks but if there is something broken it gets fixed really fast, whereas if something is broken on master then it sometimes stays broken for a really long time.