I have been using GNU Emacs since the late 1980s. It has been my life's editor, so to speak. At 59 1/2, it seems unlikely that I will ever switch to another editor. It's served me well. I am grateful to the hackers that created it.
Can you give the n00b's any tips on how to master emacs while keeping it interesting?
I started with Emacs as my first editor when I first was learning how to code a few years ago. I played with it for about a year, then left it for VSCode when I got a job as the projects at the time were heavily JS/TypeScript based, then slowly went back to Emacs as I started to feel frustrated at how painful it was to do certain things on VSCode that I knew would be lower-friction on an editor like Emacs or Vim.
This second time around it has helped me a lot to not feel like I need to rush to master it, taking time instead to focus on committing one or two commands to muscle memory every 10 days or so, and looking at other people's configuration files for inspiration. Studying these configs in particular [0], [1] helped me quite a bit, as they're nicely commented, big enough to have some useful stuff in them and get real work done, but small enough to understand fairly quickly. I also make it a point to not add stuff to my config that I don't understand and try to follow good practices around commenting and code organization
Being OK with navigating inefficiently but making a conscious effort to learn one or two commands to handle stuff that feels painful (kill line, jump to beginning of file, jump to end of file, jump to end of line, back-to-indentation) then modifying anything that doesn't feel natural.
Learning to find help inside emacs: C-h b to list all bindings in the current buffer, or discover-my-major [2] for a friendlier interface, or [3] (highly recommended) for displaying and filtering available bindings as you type them. Cheatsheet [4] for creating your own cheatsheets to note and recall commands you're working on learning.
Finally, taking advantage of the fact that you don't need to leave Emacs for certain things. For example, at work we use Trello, and I love being able to check Trello from inside Emacs via org-trello-mode. It's very nice to not have to context switch when coding. Not to mention Magit (super powerful git gui inside emacs) and Tramp mode (for editing files over ssh from the comfort of emacs).
Also, I've generally found people to be extremely helpful on #emacs on freenode IRC. I've learned a lot thru osmosis just observing conversation there :)
[0] https://github.com/jsks/dotfiles/tree/master/emacs/.emacs.d
[1] https://github.com/flyingmachine/emacs-for-clojure/
[2] https://framagit.org/steckerhalter/discover-my-major