I’m sorry to inform you that it is perfectly possible. When I encounter a system which has a completely stock and unconfigured Emacs, I generally only modify one or two settings, and then I’m perfectly happy to use it in that state. I’ve used Emacs for 30 years, and I still use it heavily every day.

I have a 1200+ lines of config, but they’re mostly nice-to-haves and full-blown apps. But I can do fine with vanilla if needed. My EDITOR is mg which is barest than bare emacs.

Also, vanilla emacs have full support for customize, so I can just go there to quicly setup settings. The reason my config is huge is because I dislike customize and prefer setting options via code.

One of the sharpest people I know—he's a professor and hacks on the LLVM for a living—uses stock Emacs in the terminal with no discernible customization.

Linus Torvalds lives in pretty much vanilla microemacs.

People have been doing this since the 70s :)