There have been some discussions on the mailing list about prompting users when emacs first runs to figure out whether they want CUA, evil, or normal bindings. I think that would go a long way to easing the initial “I can’t even write text” experience that is often emacs out of the box for new users.

Make it enabled by default.

There shouldn't be any goddamn high places!

But it breaks others’ preferred behavior. It also does not play nice with keyboard macros. Emacs is software way older than most Junior developers and needs to cater so many very different use cases and extension libraries.

The way this was proposed was, only prompt for the modern-user-friendly options like CUA mode if the user doesn't have an ~/.emacs.d/init.el or .emacs file, which makes some sense to me. Emacs isn't the kind of thing you run on remote machines and expect it to be at all like the one you have locally (like you can mostly do with vi).

The others who prefer Emacs's default behavior are a dwindling constituency of the user base. Eventually they will all be dead, and the only people becoming users of Emacs (if any) will be people used to the Windows/Mac way of doing things.

You have to meet your users where they are, otherwise you won't have users. For desktop applications, that means using the standard interface conventions and shortcuts for common operations.