I'm a regular emacs user but I completely understand this sentiment. It looks gnarly and puts many people off.

On the other hand, nobody bothers writing out the equivalent in VSCode or another conventional editor because it's so much worse:

    "" <left> <Ctrl+V> <Ctrl+left> <hold shift> <Ctrl+right> <release shift> <Ctrl+C> <wrap-selection-in-parens-command(?)> info <Ctrl+left> <hold shift> <right> <release shift> <Ctrl+X>

>> " " C-b C-y C-a C-SPC C-e M-( info C-a C-k C-/

> Ohh emacs. lol

This may seem like a lot of work but at least for me this is all muscle memory, so I happen to type them without even realising what I am typing.

It is sort of like playing the piano. When you play your favourite song on the piano, you don’t think of the keys you are pressing. It is all muscle memory. You just let your brain and fingers do the work and your conscious being can simply enjoy the music. It’s like that with Emacs too!

Also, since this is Emacs we are talking about, of course we have a simpler alternative that involves only a couple of keystrokes: C-0 c. This is discussed in the next section of the post.

That looks daunting, but it's not just a big string of key sequences you have to memorize. Half of them are moving the cursor around, and the sequences follow from what you're doing. It'd be a bit like critiquing the equivalent vscode '" " <left arrow> C-v C-a <shift> C-e ...'

To be fair that's a series of individual commands, rather than being one huge command. Also you can quite easily make all of that one key binding if you do this enough.

The only reason Emacs people actually write it out is because it's so easy and natural.

I saw it and said: ooh, what's that, looks intense? And then I actually looked at the first couple and went ooooh, type in double quotes, jump back and paste (C-a then C-y), select the whole thing (C-a C-SPC C-e), etc etc till the end. Except without really "saying anything" in my head, cos it's just muscle memory, you do it all the time, it's like walking.

While I get that it is meant as humorous, the article puts this as a particularly negative, complicated command example and says that you can use

C-0 c

to get the same result.

this is like being upset about a long shell command using a lot of pipes -- it's ugly but it's comprehensible because when you build it, you do it interactively, in parts, and then if you're ever going to use it again you save it as a function