Maybe it's me, but starting out with Emacs the previous month, I tried using Doom Emacs the other week, and the number of packages it was being used frightened me. Building your own init.el is much much better, because you know your Emacs in and out, and dont have random keybindings triggering stuff. Maybe I'll never get the popularity of Doom
As a long time Emacs user, I feel that this is slightly unfair. When I first started out, I found that my documents from Emacs were far more common than in other editors. It took me two years to realise that I was often bumping C-t where trying to hit C-r or C-y and silently transposing two characters. In over twenty years of Emacs usage, I have never once used C-t on purpose. I feel that this perfectly matches the "keybindings triggering random stuff" experience and it is fully there in vanilla Emacs.
With twenty years of experience, I have my own, esoteric init file that I would not recommend on any newbie. However, I personally feel that Emacs has succeeded despite its default keybindings.