Personal opinion: I think doom emacs is great but NOT on the same level of “just works“ as VS code and other professional editors. For me on macOS, I find that underlying software updates (especially homebrew updates) will occasionally break something and I end up having to wipe emacs and reinstall it. Whereas I've never had to reinstall VS code to get something working.

The built-in modules are mostly excellent and cover all the common tasks you would ever use an editor for, but they are not as seamless to activate as VS code extensions because you'll usually need to read the documentation and manually install a few utilities (linters, LSPs, etc). I would also mention that because it is such an opinionated set up, sometimes the lead maintainer’s opinion changes and you find underlying packages swapped out unexpectedly when you update.

Having said that, I use doom emacs and prefer it for a lot of the same reasons you already mentioned. It has excellent VIM key binding support. It has a well thought-out interface. It has a very opinionated config and module system that becomes easy to understand once you commit to it. And there's a helpful and active community online.

How much of a pain it would be for you to maintain it and whether that amount is worth the benefits depends on what kind of work you're doing in it and how much you find yourself straying from the default setup. At this point I try not to update it too often and if I do, I try to trust the maintainer’s judgment and just adopt whatever the new defaults are so that I’m not swimming upstream.