I totally agree. The only reason I justify my Emacs customization is because I customize it very slowly, over years, and periodically remove things I don’t use any more.
It’s getting harder to justify now that alternatives like VS Code have a bucketload of features and working autocomplete without futzing around too much. It’s just that VS Code is so damn slow. Maybe better language server support will bring me back to Emacs as my daily driver in a couple years, or maybe I’ll be paying for CLion.
I wonder if it's more time wasted when you have to change editors every few years because of changes in the funding model of the corporate patron of the product and relearn how to use the entire environment with "sane defaults" versus creating some custom keybindings that you like essentially one time and then using them for 30 years in an editor that has a license and community that makes it unlikely to suddenly cease to exist.
People act like there's all this extra work to using software like Emacs over corporate IDEs, or GNU+Linux over corporate OSes, but I contend that it is merely different and better-documented work. The corporate environments just make more promises, and then everyone is surprised when the promises are broken.
Some examples of unnecessary customisation is the fact that the defaults of emacs so often ought to be changed. E.g. why does M-SPC do just-one-space instead of the strictly more powerful cycle-spacing (answer: probably a combination of history, neglect, and a fear of breaking existing saved keyboard macros), why use upcase-word instead of upcase-dwim? Why does autocomplete require so much customisation?
If emacs had better defaults there would be much less reason for spacemacs or doom to exist.
One person I work with will (drastically) customise the key bindings for each new mode before using it, making it hard to use new modes. Another gave up on customising emacs and switched to spacemacs to no longer have to think about customisation.