Won't lie... there was a fair amount of cursing involved and, despite the love, I wouldn't recommend many to venture down this road[^2].
Now I have gone the literate config way in my dotfiles https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/tree/main/emacs and I jump between Cursor (vscode-based), Neovim and Emacs for different tasks on a daily. I also found https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/module... just a few days ago which could be a useful resource when you're building yours up.
> Unsolicited tip: Take it as a hobby! Picked up a bunch of useful learnings from my Emacs experiences (a. literate configs, b. comfort around working with LISPs, c. bigger appreciation for parts of the GNU ecosystem, d. more in-depth understanding of how my devtools work which helps me debug issues in Neovim or vscode when I see them) but still think that I'm cursed by wanting to go down this road so badly. Wish I could just vscode my way through life and build dope stuff, unencumbered!
P.S.: I found Emacs far less painful ever since I started rubber-ducking with ChatGPT about my elisp and configuration problems a few years ago, so now is definitely a nicer time to take the plunge.
1: Used Emacs heavily in college over 12 years ago when I would boot the Windows + Novell groupware school computers into my own Ubuntu config with my Emacs and embedded dev toolchain from my pendrive.
2: The single-threaded-ness and related ocassional unresponsiveness/hangups still grind my gears.
thankfully though, most of the stuff that you want to do are just a google search away these days, and presence of declarative package-managers f.e. use-package, straight etc. does lighten the burden somewhat.
you might want to look at: https://emacs.amodernist.com/ which provides a rudimentary configuration generator.