I'm the same.

In all honesty, when you start up emacs for the first time with a blank config, it looks terrible. But then you start building it up with plugins and adding code to support your own quirky workflows and slowly it becomes too powerful in your life to ignore. I have not been able to drop it for 13 straight years. With AI taking over the development experience, emacs and neovim have only become even better, because now you can get AI to bake your custom workflows into the config for you.

Emacs/neovim should be the gold standard for all workflow tools.

I did the same. I started with Doom Emacs and then a year later decided to start from scratch and build the computing environment I wanted. But I think the experience of Doom showed me what was possible, what I liked, and what I really had no need for.

I make small config changes every day and its super fun to use my computer this way. I wish everything was configurable like Emacs.