I've been using Emacs for more than 30 years and my init file is mostly loading and configuring extra packages, and not customizing the editing behavior. I have no problem working in a basic "emacs -q" session (which skips loading the init file) when I don't want to "pollute" my main session (eg. working with huge logs/dumps).
This is the way. While I do rebind plenty keys to enhanced or do-what-I-mean versions, I'm careful to avoid fundamentally change the meaning of any of the vanilla keys. So I see my config as more of a progressive enhancement over `emacs -q` or `mg` and I can still work with them just fine (if somewhat less comfortably).
Being able to work with `emacs -q` is also important to me for extending Emacs. It's easy to partially roll back a change if I break something in my config, and I can test out new elisp code against base Emacs.
This has gotten easier as the years go by, as well. Standard emacs has a lot of affordances that computers just couldn't do without bogging down the system years ago.
