> First write a bunch of config to undo all the bad settings and nonsense that comes with the stock editor

I've now used Emacs for 30 year. The only people who have large configs for basic text editing are people who don't understand the first thing about Emacs.

Emacs is not a text editor. It is an elisp environment focused on text manipulation.

For some reason these people are extremely loud and have a lot of blogs.

The only parts of my init.el which aren't stock are those used to setup speciality packages like the tui for connecting to the prod database.

The rest of my code is in packages which do something useful. E.g. local llm integration.