My experience with Spacemacs was the complete opposite. There's a ton of inconsistency with the quality of the provided layers which is why YMMV when using it. The C++ layers up till last year was an utter disaster and I don't know if it's been fixed since.
The WORST thing about spacemacs though is their absolutely broken release process. The master branch rarely upgrades with fixes applied to the develop branch, and the tacit recommendation is just to run "on the bleeding edge." I have no idea why spacemacs users tolerate this, but my productivity has since improved after ditching it.
I run the develop branch and I can't really remember any significant bugs I've had.
I can kinda agree the C++ layer was definitely a bit of a pain, but I had general pain setting up a good workflow for C++ in emacs with the project I was working on (most of the emacs packages assumed a different layout, so couldn't understand my CMakeLists to generate the files it would need to look at for smart completion).
Overall, I quite like spacemacs, I used to hack on it a bit to make it suit my needs better, but now I rarely have anything I need to do it "just works" now.
I particularly appreciate that almost any language I want to use, I can just download a layer (I think it often prompts you to install one when you open the file automatically!) and a lot of the common across languages editor functions you want have similar keybindings, and the `which-key` popup will tell you anything you're missing. It makes a very short ramp up to being productive in your editor for a new language.
I'll be honest, my experience since has been that VSCode is... just better? I've been using vim/emacs for over 20 years now so it's a tough pill to swallow, but after trying out VSCode, I have to say that making it easy to program extensions with async functionality from the get-go was the right way to go. I think no combination of rtags, cquery, clangd, lsp, etc in Emacs/Vim/Neovim can approach the performance and quality of VSCode's C++ dev experience. And I say that having honestly tried every permutation of the above for many hours across many weeks.
you definitely can use evil mode but you will find a lot of edge cases where you have to configure something in some modes to behave sanely whereas with spacemacs they have usually done all that legwork of anything you want to use.
