Yeah, the menu bar thing just makes no sense. Here's what a completely uncustomized emacs looks like: https://i.imgur.com/0vFsd3p.png

If you for whatever reason absolutely need to run it in the terminal, then you'll have to either learn that F10 toggles the menu bar, but then it still looks like a real menu bar that you can navigate with the arrows and enter: https://i.imgur.com/ETA2Qhs.png (or you can `M-x xterm-mouse-mode` to use the mouse in the terminal).

(That said, I'm sure the out of the box experience with Borland was quite a bit better back in the day, if you only needed Pascal or C++ support. And emacs really could do with a better default-theme; e.g. simply changing to the built-in modus-vivendi-tinted and it looks like https://i.imgur.com/lRAWzJK.png instead. Doesn't help with the tool-bar icons from 1999 or whatever though)