Doom is in all respects Emacs. It's a relatively thin layer of abstractions on top of Emacs. I've lived through a fair share of emacs.d bankruptcies until finally settling down on using Doom, and I almost don't even use "the official" modules — I use the core of Doom with a set of my own modules. You can easily scroll through early-init.el to understand what Doom adds on top of vanilla Emacs; what's there really to even "learn about"?

I have thought about rebuilding my config from scratch once again, with all the knowledge I gained over the years, but every time I think about it, I conclude that I inevitably would end up replicating some nice macros that Doom has, which do considerably reduce otherwise unavoidable boilerplate I'd have to write.

Doom may have improved discoverability of Emacs — a major complaint of newbies known for decades — but it can't magically make Emacs "something else entirely". I don't even get what you're talking about, it's like finding any complex package written in Elisp and lament that it doesn't even feel like an Emacs thing.