As a sysadmin in a mixed shop in the early 1990s I found that I could do just fine with traditional CLI and scripting tasks without using HP-UX's SAM or Sun's Solstice tools, but AIX's SMIT and smitty really got in the way of that sort of cheap and dirty automation. I understood the purpose of all those tools, but AIX pretty well made SMIT and smitty obligatory and that did not sit well with me back then. In the context of what you've said comparing SMIT and systemd, I would agree based on my experiences of way back then.
I liked smitty for the <ESC>4 that would show the script/command that smitty would use. I used this feature a lot in the beginning to learn the IBMisms of AIX.
As the years go by one realizes that even these “features” like Org, Dired, etc are just illusions in some sense. They’re just Elisp code someone else wrote and put a name on. You can take or leave them or write your own code that changes/advises/customizes them.
It’s all up to you. You don’t need a blessed “plugin” architecture, some PM at IntelliJ’s permission etc
At some point one realizes the “visual shell” nature of Emacs. Every single piece of text on screen can be programmed to “mean something” (see also: “recognizers” from human interface research) and have actions taken on it either by the editor itself, or external processes / scripts you call with a command. If it’s common enough, make a key binding. It’s your house, do what you want
Depending on how you set up your environment, you may never have to look at text again that you do not have this level of power over. You are no longer at the mercy of “application developers”
I’ve been using it since 2005. Guess how many of 2005’s popular editors even still exist
My recommendation to anyone trying to actually learn is start with the full vanilla config, weird default keybindings, etc, go through the built in tutorials, and only add things to your config that you write and understand yourself. Understand it in its own terms. The plethora of packages, etc have “cool features” but impede learning by adding mountains of complex dependencies that are opaque to the beginner and cause confusion IMO