The thing is that you can learn it very incrementally. I've been using it for years and don't know more than a tiny bit. My knowledge of elisp is abysmal. But, you get to learn how to add little things to your config here and there when you find something worth trying or improving.

Meanwhile I recommend just learning the vanilla defaults as best as possible. As long as you know how to open files, save things, switch between buffers, and quit, you're kind of good to go as far as immediate usability goes. Eventually you learn a few more key bindings to make navigation easier and faster, how to use macros, shell commands, etc. But you can learn these things on an as-needed basis.