Evil makes the transition from vim manageable, but once I was sufficiently far down the rabbit hole, I found I was consistently having to tweak and hack to keep evil working...eventually I bit the bullet and gave vanilla emacs bindings a shot, and haven’t looked back. YMMV, of course, and spacemacs comes highly rated.
But at the very least, they’re both good gateway drugs to get your first hit of the hard stuff
After using vim for about 20 years, I switched to emacs+evil about 10 to 15 years ago.. and spent a lot of time in the first 5 years or so tweaking stuff. Things have mostly stabilized in the last 5 years, and I still use evil.
One thing that helped me a ton was using hydra. Whenever I install a new mode or package, I bind all of its useful functions to hydras. Hydra and evil allow me to keep all virtually all my bindings vim-like.
But at the very least, they’re both good gateway drugs to get your first hit of the hard stuff