[samus]

Pleasing the newer/younger crowd is important! The default experience of Emacs should make it possible for new users to get up to speed as quickly as possible. Else, Emacs will slowly fade to irrelevance until it is a museum piece. There are of course different views about how to approach this.

Of course, for any change there should be switches or other possibilities to restore the old user experience. Power users (especially of Emacs) can be expected to be able to maintain their init.el file. Even the case of Spacebar Heating[0] could be handled that way. The legacy of a genuine technical bug should not impact the rest of the community forever.

Some might point out that there are Emacs distributions out there that offer a modern experience. But these are hardly known to newcomers. Distribution shopping is a useless distraction before starting to use an editor which already has a higher-than-average learning curve.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1172/