One of the things about Emacs and Vim is that you have commands that does things. They all have the same conceptual model. In vim, you have the text objects, the motions, and the counts (and more advanced ones like line and pattern addressing). In emacs, you have the point, the mark, and the arguments (including the universal one) (the advanced ones are which modes are currently active). That’s mostly the internal state that matters when you think about an edit which changes A to B.

You think about the evolution of the internal state and the suitable commands just appears, just like you think of an idea and the suitable words appears. Learning commands is like expanding your vocabulary, not learning how to speak. Learning how to speak is internalizing the aforementioned conceptual model.