Came here to find this. MANY upvotes.

I used Doom for a couple months.

Then started considering a vanilla eMacs. I started taking notes on packages I found highly recommended and interesting.

Then I found this. And the author has done all that work and then made it into a “let me walk through a config” including a lot of the most recommended packages and sensible configs.

Gives you the lesson of building a config, knowing what’s in your config, and then being fluent in changing it.

He also has more notes on his blog about the packages + more : https://www.jamescherti.com/essential-emacs-packages/

And I now feel comfortable making changes myself.