The advice you'll hear most often, these days, is to start with Doom emacs. Spacemacs is another option, you'll have to do some digging around to figure out why one vs. the other; all I know is that the energy around 'vim keybindings for emacs' has shifted to Doom.
The advantage of using one of those over something like prelude + evil, is that the whole community tends to use the vim bindings, so all the supplementary material is oriented toward that sort of input, and your chances of getting questions answered goes way up.
evil-mode has been around for a long time, and I think there are plenty of people who use it. I do not, though I've been tempted often because my primary job role is sysadmin and I used vim before I used emacs. At this point I'm more comfortable with emacs keybindings, and the nightmare is switching between the two.
Most often I just use TRAMP now for remote editing, instead of trying to switch between vim and emacs throughout the day or installing emacs on all of my servers.
At the same time, that's another reason I haven't yet tried evil-mode: it's such a massive change to the defaults that I worry I wouldn't be able to use a vanilla install of emacs successfully. But I guess I would be able to use vim instead. I probably overthink these things.