Agreed. Having gone through it several times myself, I don't even mind init.el bankruptcy once every 5-10 years. It's kind of rejuvinating to clean house and start anew. And these days the "starter kits" like Doom make it easy to setup sane defaults for 95% of what you want to do.

What really bothers me is the sluggish performance, especially when handling large numbers of buffers or even searching large files. Pretty sure fussing with Elisp is not going to fix that.