I personally had used Vanilla Emacs for 5 years (currently a quarter of my life). I put a lot of work into my config, and learnt a lot of lisp along the way. That config will always have a special place in my heart.
However, I realized that I will never be able to make anything nearly as good and maintained as doom emacs. There was no point in trying to recreate pretty much everything that was already created in doom emacs (the functionality between my config and doom is surprisingly similar), and so I realized that it just made a lot more sense to do the switch. It eventually happened after my linter failed for the last time, and in the middle of my work I took two hours and made the switch.
My config does not do too much special. I use EXWM (which doom’s fast loading times make easier). There will probably be more added later for my email configuration and all.