I am a long-time Emacs user and used to maintain my own config, but I switched to Doom Emacs [1] a year ago. Doom Emacs is like a pre-packaged/pre-configured emacs distro. You still need to configure the features that you want to use, but it's a lot easier (and faster) than having to do everything from scratch, and definitely if you already have some emacs background anyway. For me, it makes the newer, more advanced, features more accessible. Since switching, I started to use Emacs more again.
i tried Doom Emacs and the first thing that turned me down was the VI bindings, which i disabled right after install. But yeah it does the whole configuration nightmare more easy to maintain.
[1] https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs