I started with prelude[1], I wanted something batteries included to use as my main editor right away, but not as structurally different from vanilla as Doom or Spacemacs. Then after a couple of years I rewrote my config line by line looking at what prelude did and keeping only what I needed.

I’m happy with result, but this was 7 years ago so there may be better options than prelude to do something similar today.

[1] https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude