Also, adding evil mode won't address half of my requirements for a baseline Emacs experience. There are performance optimizations in Doom that I wouldn't otherwise have known to put in my own configuration. I'm grateful there are people who are taking care of such details for users like me.
Normally, I avoid configuration frameworks. I don't use them in tmux, vim, or zsh. But Doom was the first configuration framework that I enjoyed using.
[1]: https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/blob/master/early-ini...
Also, there are loads of people who need the things you found questionable or unnecessary. Including myself. I use modules for purposes other than adding support for new languages. But for language support, I sometimes need much more than just the first language server and syntax files that came up in a search result. The performance optimization you found questionable is an absolute must, too. Running "doom sync" to apply changes to configuration is a non-issue if that means faster startup.
So the advantage of having someone else optimise a config is lost because most effort is spent supporting tons of optional packages. Meanwhile my hand written config is the definition of opinionated.
Doom Emacs' config loads faster than my hand-rolled one did.
So in that sense, with Doom I get a smaller config to maintain, for something that loads faster, while still having a rich/coherent set of features for the stuff I do bump into.
Having browsed the Doom config sources the other day, they put a lot of effort to minimize startup time; there are various trick there that tune Emacs itself to start faster, and can be copied over to one's own vanilla config :).