Agreed. It's gotten easier. If I was starting Emacs from scratch again, I'd probably write my own vanilla config. But Doom helped introduce me when the concept was bizarre and foreign to me, and I'm very grateful for that. Now I'm comfortable with my Doom config, and it works great, so I have little incentive to ditch it.

The problem I have with doom and spacemacs is that it seems to be bringing people into the emacs community using the vi keybindings as default, including people who were not vim users before... which is... strange.

Vanilla Emacs keybindings, or cua-mode, are fine, and probably less of a learning curve than going modal. If you're already in that headspace, all power to you, but half the reason I got into emacs in the first place was because I couldn't stand vi.