Oh, kinda like how I learned Emacs: use it "wrong" for years, treating it as a sort of weird archaic Notepad++, then gradually discover features, master the keybindings, and learn to program Emacs Lisp over time until my proficiency, and the utility the editor provided to me, grew.
these days i'm seriously considering switching to zed tho
That sounds like a horrible way of learning Emacs, but fair enough. I don't think you need to know elisp as a prerequisite but personally I learnt enough of it to be able to get by without Customize.
You might want to read Zed's EULA.
The GP is right to be offended by what you said, because his way of learning Emacs was an extremely typical one for decades. Remember that such informative and inspirational resources like Mastering Emacs didn't exist until the 2010s. I myself got into Emacs around the turn of the millennium because I wanted a free IDE for my programming-language classes at uni, and also I wanted to use Gnus which was such a capable mail and Usenet reader. It was only over years, as I amassed various problems that I needed to solve and tasks to automate, that I began learning all the tricks of Emacs customization and then eventually Emacs Lisp itself.
You got the ELisp intro right in the help section since forever.
Of course, but not everyone has a reason to look at it in the beginning. As I said, I only became interested in hacking Elisp once I had been using Emacs for a long while (years) and eventually ran into cases where I wanted to change default behaviour. Meanwhile, all my hacking energy was going to other languages for which I just used Emacs as the IDE with the supplied major modes.
Ah, when I was a teen I always wanted to read everything as I had no internet at home and often you founds manuals, gems such as great programming and Math books and whatnot.
EULA's are for corporate customers. as a normal person you dont need to care about breaking contracts unless its related to your job
Well, I'm sorry for not employing a Hackernews-approved data-driven, spaced-repetition learning technique utilizing Pomodoro, Zettelkasten, and balanced gut bacteria to optimize the time to proficiency. I was frickin' 18 when I discovered Emacs (and Linux), it was 1995, and most of us were just figuring this crap out as we went.
I do not use Zed's online services, only the editor itself which is GPLv3. If I need AI I wire in a third-party ACP provider, which is easy enough to configure.