I spent all last weekend trying to configure an Doom Emacs instance following the latest guides and watching countless tutorials. I tried it on three different OS and was unsuccessful with different reasons each time.
I've come to the conclusion that Emacs is a black hole, and people who profess their love for it in 2023 are likely exhibiting some form of the sunk cost fallacy. Life is too short to spend all your time configuring it.
Being one of those people that still recommends Emacs and have sunk countless hours in my personal dotfiles: I kinda enjoy doing it, that's why I am doing it. It feels great having a configuration so tailored to me personally that it almost feels like clothing or other lifestyle choices. I mean sure, clothes, makeup, cars and whatever are all also huge wastes of time and resources in our short and mostly dreadful lives, but at least Emacs still brings me joy :-)
As one of those tragics who can't stop tweaking my Emacs setup, I'm not sure I disagree with your conclusion.
That said, I don't think you can draw too many conclusions about Emacs from how difficult it is to turn Doom into your own bespoke setup. It abstracts a huge amount, drastically changes default behaviours, and basically needs an entire new ecosystem of Doom compatible packages, of varying quality, to make it work. I often advise that even if people plan to go Doom or Spacemacs, they should spend a week or two trying out vanilla Emacs with their own customisations applied as they go.
Not only do people tend to warn up to them, but even if they still choose to go down the Doom/Spacemacs/Whatever route, they have a better understanding of what's being abstracted away, and how to sometimes glue things back together when something breaks.
Then don't use Doom Emacs. As a more than twenty year emacs user, I've been using Doom Emacs the last two or three years. Since, I have better things to do than to update every Doom Emacs to the latest unstable version of a few hundred Emacs packages, I've two or three months between updates. This broke regularly the doom script and or straight.el builds. I've debugged it once and found out that that starting with the default Doom configuration works. And then you can add module by module. Whereas installing all modules I wanted, at once, failed.
Therefore, I dropped Doom Emacs and am very happy with my new clean Emacs config.
In my opinion, it’s not something you should try to do all at once. Install Emacs, even the normal “vanilla” Emacs, then start using it. (If you’ve never used it at all, start with the tutorial.) You can configure things as you go. You’ll probably keep trying new options and packages for the rest of your life, spending a few minutes here and there as you try new things or hear of a good idea from someone else.
What do you mean by "configuring emacs"? Despite what the article says, emacs is imminently useable right out of the box. Though you're not wrong about emacs being a black hole :)
Critisizing sophisticated tools though, that's like saying we should go back to drafting tables rather than use autocad because the learning curve is steep. Once you learn the tool it accelerates everything you do.
I've come to the conclusion that Emacs is a black hole, and people who profess their love for it in 2023 are likely exhibiting some form of the sunk cost fallacy. Life is too short to spend all your time configuring it.