Another reason emacs as an OS (not fully, but you know) is such a great way to get used to things you have on systems. Hence the quote: "GNU is my operating system, linux is just the current kernel".

As a greybeard linux admin, I agree with you though. This is why when someone tells me they are learning linux the first thing I tell them is to just type "info" into the terminal and read the whole thing, and that will put them ahead of 90% of admins. What I don't say is why: Because knowing what tooling is available as a built-in you can modularly script around that already has good docs is basically the linux philosophy in practice.

Of course, we remember the days where systems only had vi and not even nano was a default, but since these days we do idempotent ci/cd configs, adding a tui-editor of choice should be trivial.