As a counterexample to that somewhat... I initially tried learning emacs with spacemacs, and the amount of customization in spacemacs’s config made it difficult for me to compare it to much of the emacs documentation out there. Whatever documentation spacemacs had at the time was confusing enough to me that it wasn’t quite enough.

I later ended up starting with a stock config, and I probably could pick up spacemacs now if I wanted to, but at this point I don’t feel the need.