The learning curve is steep, that is true. I guess one has to invest some learning to get the good stuff. I myself needed 2 attempts at getting into Emacs. One very short one, where I found myself struggling with even saving a buffer, that ended quickly. The other one more serious, investing my free time out of curiosity, what all the Emacs fuss is about. At some later point I discovered org mode and from then on, there was simply no way back for me to something less. Similar for Magit. Or running shells inside Emacs and being able to simply copy anything from a shell buffer, because it is a buffer and not some readonly thingy in a separate window. Very useful.

Now I use org mode almost every day and definitely for all kinds of documentation and notes. It might not be perfect out of the box for formula rendering, but even that can be arranged/configured, so that you can switch to rendered formulas inside your buffer and I have done so in the past.

I have not tried to use Doom Emacs or Spacemacs or whatever flavour. I started with standard Emacs and went with that and still use that. If Doom Emacs or Spacemacs introduce too many new concepts or make the learning curve too steep, perhaps trying standard Emacs will be a better experience.

Not sure what use context menus would have in my personal workflow. Perhaps if they could be opened via keyboard shortcut and then I could select menu items quickly, it would be useful.