Update: The current state of my winter break deep dive into Emacs is that actually for all these years I've been using Emacs like Vim (as a text editor for just a few files at a time), and maybe I don't actually need to learn how to use a whole new computer, I just need to learn Vim.
I was honestly lying awake at night feeling icky about Stallman's authoritarian imagination. Why did the great advocate of the Unix philosophy then try to create an end-run around it?