[Barrin92]

>but I tend to be scared away instead.

I think a lot of the myth-making around the power and the cleverness of long time emacs wizards paradoxically achieves exactly what happened to you, it makes Emacs seem more intimidating than it is. Also true for a lot of programming languages with that reputation.

Is emacs old, has weird keybindings and weird UI paradigms? Yes, but it's also just a piece of software and there's nothing in the way of learning it. It calls itself the self-documenting text editor for a reason, it has plenty of learning tools deliberately built in. Despite its reputation, from language support to help there's very few pieces of software that have put that much emphasis on being accessible.

You can still use other software, don't need to go all-in, etc, but I'd always recommend everyone to give it at least a shot.