Yeah that’s fair. In many ways the spacemacs/doom model is more akin to what you describe, with a lot of caveats; it’s not a total rework of all key bindings. In emacs novice affordances are usually an afterthought, not part of the core design and community norms.

Of course, I must say there is a trade off here: you can design for novices or for advanced users, but very often not both.