I'm aware of evil-mode. I'm attempting to try 'the Emacs way' first. I'm not attempting to just throw myself in. When I need to be proficient I'll fallback to Vim, but I want to gain access to things like org-mode, for instance.

"The Emacs way" is very much "learn some elisp and write whatever you want".

I switched from Vim to Emacs and in the beginning there were some things I really missed. One that I remember was "*", which in Vim/my config highlights current word in whole buffer and let's you n/N between matches. In Emacs, doing the same with M-left C-s C-w felt just wrong.

Fixing this was a matter of 2-3 lines of very straightforward elisp. I since started relying more on Occur mode and IEdit mode for this, but the experience of lacking a feature and adding it absolutely painlessly remained with me.

Writing simple elisp and simple editing-related features is a joy under Emacs. It's much easier than in Vim, for a number of different reasons. This makes me think that "the Emacs way" is about scripting and programming it to do whatever you need it to do.

You may also be interested in https://github.com/nschum/highlight-symbol.el which provides highlighting of the current symbol, and provides highlight-symbol-{next,prev} commands to move between occurrences of a symbol.