The perils of combining executive config with long-lived sessions. I frequently try something out by evaling it first to see if I want to put it in my permanent config then forget to actually add it. Mickens almost had it right about "perfect window placement", it's just perfect editore state (including open files and caret position)

Do they have terrible UX, though?

I'm also a vim user as my primary editor. My .vimrc does very little beyond the default .vimrc. I don't want to spend any time configuring my tools, I just want them to work. And that's what I get with vim, on any Linux system out there: a vim that works pretty much exactly the same as the config I use on my own machine and know well. If it's not already installed (and it often is), vim is just a package manager call away.

If you really think your tools have terrible UX, find/build better tools?

I'm not convinced time spent in my dotfiles isn't just time wasted. I don't want to hack my tools, I just want my tools to work. And vim does. Most of the tools I've come across for vim, are already in vim with good enough UX. The exception is language-specific tooling for stuff like highlighting compiler/linter errors or failing tests, but it's a massive amount of work to get that stuff working, and I'm not sure that pays off when I can just run that stuff from the shell. Sure, it takes a second to switch to another command line tab to run the tool from shell, but how many 1-second switches does it take to add up to 4 hours spent debugging my .vimrc? It's not worth it.

And, by the way, I'm not throwing any shade here. If you like fiddling around with your config files, that's an entirely valid reason to spend any amount of time that you want, fiddling around with your config files. Do what you enjoy--you don't need my blessing, but you have my blessing.

Just be honest with yourself about why you're doing it, and do it on your own time. If you need to complete a task in a timely manner, it's extremely unlikely that any step in completing that task involves your editor configuration. There's absolutely no way that all that Emacs configuration was the fastest way to reproduce that bug in the OP.

I liked the emacs config discussion.

I love the author's style. Not every blog need do it, but I appreciate that fasterthanli.me does it.

To me, it is intellectually honest: this shows a reader every step along the way, every painful trail that must be overcome from point A to point B. Nothing is omitted. And I think the sooner we all did this, as an industry, the sooner the very many problems and bugs that exist (that get hit before we can even "get to the point", as you say) would get dragged into the light, and maybe we'd progress, as a society, towards having computers that weren't shit.