He did say that he prefers Emacs to be Emacs; Doom Emacs is more of a vim-in-Emacs, isn't it? That's probably a very good thing (were I starting out, I would probably use Doom or at least Evil mode), but for those of us used to the Emacs bindings it is a chore to switch now.

Not author, but I used Prelude for a long time and swapped to Doom a couple years ago and far prefer Doom's approach.

Doom is just a git repo you check out into .emacs.d. It has no state other than updating your git repo to update Doom, and some cache files that can be removed at any time. It's way easier for me to reason about what's going on and to tweak things to my liking, and to have a consistent experience across multiple machines. You can run one command 'SPC-h-d-m' to go directly to the source code of any doom module and edit it and view what it does.

It's not perfect (far too many regressions IMO across versions), but for the first time I feel like I have a super productive Emacs that I can actually grok and modify as a non-Emacs master.