Has anyone here 'adapted' to Emacs after starting out with Visual Studio / Code / etc? I have tried multiple times over the years to give it a shot but it hasn't stuck.

I also bounced off multiple times but have now been happily using it for 2 years. I really reccomend trying Doom Emacs and learning the default VIM modal editing. Doom comes with sane defaults and very simple configuration presets for every language out of the box. Learning modal editing pays off quickly.

https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs