Emacs

1. emacs-pinky impacts some users such as this https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/44c0ed/emacs_pinky/ . I've got Caps Lock mapped to both Control (down-holding) and Escape (up/down). Maybe not you at this point in your life at current usage level. And you could just be lucky and never have physical issues at all with hands and fingers and wrist.

2. vi can be found on almost any linux box so knowing the basic commands to work with text files when you might not have the luxury of installing is useful - ubiquity argument

3. the text-objects, somewhat more advanced to learn, in vim are not replicated by default in emacs and you will miss them in editing if you have put them in muscle memory. So things like da( or di( or ci" or ya{ and so on where d is the command and a( or c" and a{ are examples of a much larger list of objects that are easily manipulated

In any case things become a matter of preference and are subjective unless one remains a purist in the spirit of the church of emacs vs vim. The OPs biggest challenge is he appears to be trying to learn vim at the same time he is starting emacs. Many who came to Doom or Spacemacs were vim users switching to emacs.

I think calling something like Doom as garbage is unwarranted and objectively untrue. It is a huge community project that is addressing the needs of that community and has helped a lot of people (myself included). Simply Because the needs of that community are not the same as your needs does not mean it is garbage. Even for people not using Doom, it is a hugely valuable resource for different ways to configure packages. I no longer use Doom, but I and others frequently return to their source to learn some tips on how to configure different packages.

People should simply use the right tool for the job. If someone wants to hit the ground running with sane modern defaults, doesn't want to spend a lot of time configuring Emacs, and wants to use Vim bindings, Doom is an excellent choice. If someone wants to learn how to configure Emacs on a deeper level, spinning your own config is maybe the way to go. Neither is right or wrong, they are simply serving two different purposes, and that is fantastic!

What even is vterm? I've never heard of this tool before.

And I agree, if your gonna use Emacs regularly your most likely gonna want to start customising it to your liking. Though configs like Doom and Space are decent for beginners, eventually they are just gonna get in the way of progress.