Everything in Emacs exists under the “M-x” keybind (M stands for Meta which is usually Alt on linux and Option on macOS). Because everything you can do is a command (which are just normal functions that have been annotated). Then you have bindings to directly execute those functions instead of going through a prompt.

There’s some terminology to learn to make sense of the commands. And the default keybindings are also useful to learn (and you can find them in anything that uses the readline library and equivalent: Bash, zsh, psql,…. You can also find them in macOS text widgets).

But the thing is that Emacs have a lot of commands. They are assembled into packages and due to the nature of Elisp, can be edited and patched live. While it easy to get started (videos on youtube, the emacs documentation, the “Mastering Emacs” book), After a while, you config can become alien to anyone else. But it will stay discoverable as Emacs have a great help system.

I felt like that when I started using Emacs, about 25 years ago. It turned out to be worth it, though.

Emacs has its own tutorial (Help -> tutorial from the menus), which is a pretty good introduction. Learning to get help from Emacs itself is a bit of a learning curve, but really beneficial.

Learning to the use the help tools properly was something I didn't get around to for years, but I wish I had sooner.