Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is another system an improvement? That is my question.
Putting a few dotfiles in a repo and cloning it for each new machine is a useful way of getting the advantages of dotfiles, which are many. Avoiding all customization just so you don't have dotfiles, just so you don't have to manage dotfiles (which is not hard, there are any number of simple techniques if you don't like this project) is counterproductive
That's fine until you find one damn machine which has a buggy version procmail or a vim version which is too old for your filetype/feature plugins, 5 versions old emacs or an old version of bash etc. It's never "just that easy".
Past startups with heterogeneous kit, keep it simple.