I would, it gives a much nicer starter experience of using Emacs than vanilla does. If you later decide to roll your own config you can always do so and will have a better understanding of where you can take it.

Especially if you want to use Vim bindings which is a bit of a pain to setup nicely for all various third party packages if you start with vanilla Emacs. They have also spent a lot of time optimizing how packages are loaded in order to get the startup much more performant.

Haha, OK you asked for it. Org Mode is… well it starts way back when you were just a twinkle in your father’s excited eye and a Swiss scientist wanted a better way to organize his already very organized, very Swiss life. Oh but wait… I’m seeing that the first release was in 2003, and that the scientist was Dutch. Hmm. And of course I don’t know anything at all about your father so please forgive my deranged sense of humor… “I blame the pandemic.”

So anyway, Org Mode is using .txt files and adding a layer of parseable conventions, and then calling it a .org file. So that’s similar to a .md file. But .org is about bullet points that you can show and hide, links to other .org files, and tags for things like todo lists that then are all gathered into a central Agenda, and so on and so on. Because you have emacs behind it, there’s almost no end to what you can do, and there are guacazillion Org Mode packages that you can install. You can publish from Org Mode straight to Hugo or another static site generator. You can run a D&D game. You can run a business. You can control a database (whether or not you should). You can publish your thesis, make a zettelkasten linked-notes thingy with Org-Roam (which is great, and similar to Roam-Research, Obsidian, etc.), a personal wiki, literate programming, and so on and so on forever.

I’m using it now for notes, todos, agenda, time management. It’s good for me to have my agenda connected to my notes so that they can be blended together. I was one of those kids whose room is always messy, and for whom cleaning up feels like pushing pins into their arms, not least because they’re just hopeless at it unless they focus on just that, but they have lots of other things to focus on, not cleaning the damn room. That’s to say, I was born to have personal assistants and a cleaning staff.

Zeus, however, thought otherwise. He hurled a lightning bolt that killed off my personal assistants so that I wouldn’t have any until I finally and truly learned how to clean my room. Now, Pallas Athena, seeing my plight and taking mercy on me, gave me a gift, a tool to help me through my travails: of course it was Org Mode.

“But beware,” said grey-eyed goddess, “Org Mode takes endless pleasure in reorganizing itself according to your slightest whim as well as your best-laid plan; it’s up to you to keep you goal and vision clear.”

So I try to keep things sane, simple, and even still it’s way more flexible than anything else I’ve tried.
I can be writing/outlining an idea in one file, mark something as a [TODO] or an [IDEA], etc. etc., and Org Mode will grab those and show them to me in a consolidated view, all from text files. I can then add these items to my agenda, saying for example that I’d like to do such and such next Tuesday. If I don’t do them on Tuesday they show up on Wednesday. These little things can be well connected to the most fundamental document that describes the soul of my endeavor. So this is just notes-y stuff but everything is integrated and together, and along with the rest of Emacs, your file system, great windows/buffer etc. management, accessible from terminal, and at the same time at the level of a single file, quite simple. Oh and future-proof. You can also pull live data into your file, track numbers, create tables very easily, do spreadsheet-y things, and you have Emacs and elisp behind it so that really, there’s not much of a limit. Double-entry accounting with ledger-mode, which is emacs but then you can pump that into your org files.
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-ledger.html

Here’s a fun one that illustrates some capabilities:

A bad point is poor mobile support, though not entirely wretched. iOS apps include Plain Org and BeOrg.

Also it’s surely not for everyone. I’ve allowed myself to take liberties with this post as a kind of litmus test: If you can’t stand the diversions, unnecessary rambling and half-unhinged, eccentric style I’ve indulged in here, then it might be a hint that Org Mode and maybe Emacs isn’t for you. It’s eccentric, demands you follow its metaphors/way of thinking, has roads that lead to dead ends. It’s also extremely human, authentic, capable, flexible, will outlast everything except Vim, and if you gel with it, can fit itself to your way of thinking and being that’s powerful, creativity-enhancing, and maybe even… ennobling?

Yeah yeah… it’s basically text files.

I really laughed out loud. This is so well put.