I guess most people know by now, but Emacs’ keybindings were designed for a specific keyboard that had way more keys that usual: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/495/what-...
As Emacs was ported, they replaced dedicated keys with chords and sequences and we ended up in this mess, instead of at some point doing a full review of the default keybindings to match the input devices we actually have, merging in the conventions that had developed in the meantime.
After three decades of use, I have internalized those defaults because I keep having to use Emacs in its default configuration from time to time, have remapped many keys in my workstation, bound custom functions and all that. It’s still a paper cut, and also prevents me from recommending Emacs to more casual users.