Have you checked out doom emacs? I used to have a manually tailored emacs configuration gradually built over the years, and ditched it quite happily in favour of doom emacs. I tried spacemacs to with much less success.
I switched from Spacemacs the last time Doom Emacs was discussed here and I'm very happy with it. Took me a while to adjust, and sometimes I'll miss something Spacemacs did, or struggle with muscle-memory, but overall it's been worth it. And the people on the Doom emacs discord helped out a bunch of times too.
Doom emacs also has default vi-workflow.