Since Steve Purcell loves new technologies and update his setup
  frequently, it may be a little harder to follow him for beginners.
  
  That’s actually great. I’m lucky to stick to his setup because pulling
  from his git branch gets me updated with the latest cool things in
  community.
  
  When I say “on the shoulders of giants”, I’m stressing that you need
  set your standard higher. I’m NOT saying the master’s setup is “newbie
  friendly”. If it happens to be “friendly”, it’s just the coincidence.

I just perused through the tutorial. This is some horrible advice, IMHO.

Also, cargo culting everybody to use the Evil mode for Vim bindings in Emacs is also probably bad advice, unless you are teaching emacs to a vim user.

As a beginner, you are better off starting your emacs config from scratch.

Some of the opinions of the author have been stated as facts:-

  ...every master uses the package smex to remember keybindings

In my opinion, as of 2023, the best way to learn emacs the right way is through the textbook 'Mastering Emacs' by Mickey Petersen. Trust me, that book is well worth the price tag.

Mickey walks you chapter by chapter, while you build your own emacs configuration as you learn new things.

Once you have worked through that textbook, you will find it a piece of cake to study other people's configurations on github and learn more.

If you are looking for motivation to learn emacs, watch the short 2 minute demo videos on the Youtube Channel @EmacsRocks