I forget about the "control = by character, meta/escape = by word" idea because of that. (Maybe "smaller unit vs. bigger unit" is more accurate? I dunno.)
I don't know what I'd do with that if I were actually an Emacs user, though, since I use the Option key for typing certain characters a fair amount. Although I'm sure I could remap Emacs meta to virtually anything else, because Emacs.
I have my emacs config set up so that the left Alt key is meta, while the right one retains its original function. Think of it like AltGr on your typical PC keyboard. But I am using Mitsuharu Yamamoto’s Mac port. I don’t know if that is possible using vanilla GNU emacs, since I haven’t used it in years.
https://github.com/ppwwyyxx/dotfiles/blob/master/macOS/Libra...
It's a life saver.