I can confirm this. Been using emacs for ~7 years now and my config keeps getting smaller and smaller, not bigger. While I still have my beloved config file, I'

I can confirm this. Been using emacs for ~7 years now and my config keeps getting smaller and smaller, not bigger. While I still have my beloved config file, I'm confident that I'd be able to reproduce it within a few minutes from scratch, most of my customizations in there do not affect my workflow anymore. On one of my machines I'm just using default emacs. Maybe going from all the customizations back to vanilla emacs was part of me "learning emacs" but I think I'd tell my past self that I don't actually have to read up as much as I did and that emacs and vim aren't as scary as many people tried to make me believe. In the end learning to do the same old things as with other editors doesn't really take more than going through the tutorial, most people will already work as fast or faster by then, before I took the dive into vim and emacs I was very a "mouse and arrow keys" guy when it came to text navigation and editing. There are of course many things that could be improved when it comes to emacs defaults, I wish the devs were more open to update some of the low hanging fruits.