> When you have to figure out how to re-wire Emacs and all the various extensions you want to use to use Evil (with consistent bindings) is even more.

evil-collection actually makes this quite easy now. So if you want to roll your own Emacs config from scratch with vim keybindings, it's about as easy doing it with Emacs keybindings. It wasn't a thing when Spacemacs or Doom got started, though.