Your Emacs (or my VIM) config was simple text file, that you can open in a simple text editor, and customize it as needed, and you know where is what. My VIM config is 20 year old. A year or 2 ago, I just dumped the manual package management, and started using a plugin manager.

There are no gatekeepers, no dependencies!

This, require you to have pay $20-$200 to a 3rd party corporation, or have a kind of beefy GPU (to run locally), run some instructions on text file, keep editing till it might does what you intend it to.

You are knowingly adding a dependency, which probably will become a hard dependency when everything goes jumbled up for human reviews, either on a beefy GPU or sending your data to a shareholder pleasing corporation.

Let's distinguish, how these are not the same, and the real price we pay