A frequent complaint we hear from n00bs is that Emacs out of the box is unusable, that it’s really hard to configure, and so you need something like Doom to get going. Generations of Emacs users have put the lie to that. Lots of us have been starting with vanilla Emacs and configuring it to our needs for 40 years.
Over at the Emacs subreddit, permetz suggests that it’s fine to have a simple configuration that builds on default Emacs. Permetz has been using Emacs since 1983 and considers himself a power user but he has a simple config file that mostly consists of setting a few variables to adjust things to his liking.
That’s how I started. Back then I was still writing in C so I spent a bit of time getting Emacs to indent C the way I liked. As I went along I added some packages and wrote some custom Elisp for bespoke operations that no one else would need. Even so, after 16 or 17 years my init.el is still pretty small and I could easily trim it down by getting rid of stuff I no longer need or use.
Permetz’s message is don’t be afraid of starting small from vanilla Emacs and having a simple configuration. You’ll be surprisingly productive and your init.el can grow organically as your needs change.