I’m not so sure… I got by for a few years with no knowledge of elisp (just copy/pasting snippets here and there to get e.g, the scroll-wheel working, those were the times!), and with a basic set of commands (open/find-file, save, search, replace-regex, and some region basics). Still at that basic level, Emacs was better than most of the other editors I’d tried before.
At some point (probably when I started writing LaTeX with it), I started learning more, and I still haven’t stopped. Along the line, I started using Evil (first with my own config, nowadays with Spacemacs as a base) because it makes better sense as an editing tool, but what keeps me on Emacs nowadays is its sheer power and the uniformity of how it works. I can use my Emacs-fu for everything from coding to taking notes to doing mail, etc. So in that sense, learning to use it was a worthy investment, especially when it comes to writing any Lisp code.