[defanor]

I think the usual advice is to try the vanilla Emacs, maybe use better-defaults (either directly or just for inspiration), as it is a relatively light customization. The setups people use tend to be quite different, as do their opinions on packages, so I doubt there is a single satisfactory and agreed upon "source of truth". Others' setups may be useful to check out, possibly pages of emacswiki.org, chatter on the #emacs IRC channel at libera.chat.

Edit: As for heavily customized versions (Doom, spacemacs), I have not tried those myself, but occasionally saw people having issues with those, and others not being able to help them, since it was not clear what sort of magic is going on there. So I would not recommend those to new users, at least not if you would like to learn the basics and get a better hang of it, to be able to debug it, though some seem to be happy with those.

[tammer]

I will second the recommendation to start with vanilla emacs. That isn't to disparage releases like spacemacs & doom. I simply found those to be more useful once I fully understood the power that comes with a fully reprogrammable editor. There is a learning curve and there is also a mental model to adopt, and I think that adopting the mental model is easier when starting raw and building up from scratch. Once you feel comfortable maybe try spacemacs or doom to see if they offer advantages for your workflow.

I also highly recommend the resources at https://www.masteringemacs.org

[SoftTalker]

Another vote for vanilla, learn the basics and then add packages for what you need.

I have spent my entire career using vanilla emacs with a few other packages. A lot of things, including org-mode, are included by default in modern emacs.

The problem with learning heavily customized distributions like Doom is that they won't be installed elsewhere and if you have to use emacs on another system you won't have what you're familiar with. Weigh that relative to how often that happens in your work.

[pfortuny]

Yes, before playing football, children just mess around with a ball. The thing is to end up using the ball properly, not to play as Messi.

[weakfish]

I think that's the route I'm gonna go, I want my configuration to be transparent and built so that I can understand it top-to-bottom. I've tried Doom, but it felt too magical.

[nairadithya]

As a Doom user, the benefit is largely in discovering the absolutely vast plethora of features that Emacs and Emacs packages lend to you in a nice set of defaults and aesthetics that shouldn't feel too alien as a Neovim user. I encourage you to give it a week in parallel with your actual config.