It’s easy to be annoyed at N00bs who complain that it’s sooo hard to configure Emacs into a state useful for working with X. Sometimes, a new user will, like domsch1988, try and fail repeatedly to bend Emacs into a useful tool for their workflow. Domsch1988, to his credit, kept at it and finally succeeded. The secret, he says, is to accept Emacs for what it is and not try to make it into whatever editor you’re used to.
Domsch1988 finally realized this after several attempt to use Emacs. He tried Spacemacs, he tried Doom, and he tried vanilla Emacs but it just wouldn’t take. Finally, he realized that the problem was that he was trying to make Emacs into VSCode or Neovim rather than embrace the Emacs way of doing things. Once he accepted that, he started with a plain Emacs and only added packages when he needed a missing functionality. No more explorer sidebar just because VSCode has one. He discovered that projectile-find-file was enough and had the benefit of not wasting screen real estate.
His main problem was that Magit was slow but that was because he was on Windows, which for various reasons explained in the comments makes Magit slow. A couple of commenters noted that the built-in VC subsystem is fast on Windows and a good alternative.
Domsch1988 showed that a lot of the complaints about Emacs being hard to use really boils down to trying the keep the habits from previous editors, not Emacs. It’s a good post and worth a couple of minutes to read.