This is somewhat oblique to the content of the post but "special" is about right. "Unnecessarily obtuse", particularly from a contemporary perspective, might be a less kind way to describe it. I could say the same about the documentation which, frankly, is not great at making you immediately productive. It's written like an academic treastise, not a tutorial for a piece of software that exists to help you get stuff done and where learning the software is not an end in itself.
I've recently started making a relatively determined attempt to become proficient with emacs due to increasing frustration at poor performance from both VSCode and Sublime Text when working with larger projects and, I'm not going to lie, it's hard going.
Take something as basic as working with multiple windows. Emacs has concepts of buffers, windows, and frames, but windows and frames are diametrically opposite in concept to windows and frames in client side web development.
That's not too difficult to grasp but, say you're in dired, and you want to open a file in a new OS window (in emacs-speak this would be a frame). You'd think you could just move the caret over the filename and hit some key combination to open that file in another window (sorry, I mean frame). Possibly you can but the nearest I've managed to get so far is (from memory) C-x 5 f, which brings up the minibuffer prefilled with the pathname of the directory you're browsing in dired, and then you have to start typing the filename (which, granted, will autocomplete), which seems somewhat redundant, and only then can you open the file.
It's also full of things to trip you up, like the key bindings for switching to another (emacs) window and killing a buffer - both fairly common operations - being far too similar and easy to confuse for a newbie.
It just seems so deliberately contrary, but I'm hoping the investment will pay dividends given time and persistence (this is, however, approximately my fourth or fifth attempt in 20 years to learn emacs, so we'll see).