It isn't as complex as it seems. You can choose to be at any point in the spectrum of yak shaving; keep doing it vs skip it altogether. I did the latter with vanilla Emacs. It works just like a regular GUI text editor e.g. Notepad, gedit, etc. Only when I wanted more power I dropped into customizing my .emacs. I balance myself between doing it often vs not doing it at all.

Doing the above for 5 years I've a decent personal .emacs I take with me in a Git repo. Setting up takes less than 10 mins on any new machine.