Actually back then I used tcsh first because it was the one that commonly had niceties like.. arrow keys.
In shell, I use the emacs bindings for kill-buffer, incremental search, and end of line jump, etc. but arrow keys for cursor movement. I suspect most people who aren't using vi bindings are much the same.
To me the ctrl-n/ctrl-p thing is a piece of ideology, not practicality; as sibling comment pointed out, they are not really ergonomic, and really just date to the fact that various terminals did not have consistent arrow navigations at various point.
Actually I did get used to ctrl-p/ctrl-n in the context of an old MUD client I used to use (TinyFugue, actually I still use it sometimes). It used those bindings for history cycling. And the MOO client I used in emacs also used ESC-p for similar purposes, I recall.
So I end up using Ctrl-n and Ctrl-p to move down and up a line in my editor so that I can customize my editor to make the up and down arrow keys behave like they do in browsers.
Like you, I am annoyed by comments that gush about how great it is to use Emacs keybinds in programs other than Emacs because in for example VSCode, the editor used by about 70% of the world's programmers, none of the Emacs shortcuts work: e.g., ctrl-n / ctrl-p don't move to the next / previous line. And I'm a heavy Emacs user.
More seriously, I'm just the same with hjkl and vim - cool if it works for you, when I am scrolling through I don't need to be efficient (which is highly subjective anyway), I need to have it how I like it.
I was in the same position as you initially and it took a week or two to get the muscle memory but it's so smooth to navigate using keys near the home row compared to arrow keys.