I don't know if doom or other sort of meta-emacs distributions are as useful as they were a few years ago. Good package management is baked in to vanilla emacs

I don't know if doom or other sort of meta-emacs distributions are as useful as they were a few years ago. Good package management is baked in to vanilla emacs now, and most any package can be configured without writing a line of elisp with the M-x customize-group. I recently went from a whole subdirectory of configuration files to the single default init.el and have been very happy with it. I am still using `use-package` for some packages, but I don't really find it any better than just M-x package-install and M-x customize group. In fact I would encourage new emacs users not to use some any meta-distribution or third party package management - none of them will live as long as emacs (which will live forever).