The obvious point is that everyone disagrees about "settings that look silly to have turned off by default".
A lot of modern software uses the 'opinionated' approach. The designers come up with their preferred way of using the software product, and build the user experience around that. This gives great results a lot of the time - you get a consistent and unsurprising experience and you can build a very intuitive experience. To pick a silly example of this, Google Chrome tries very hard to prevent the expansion of extra 'settings'. That way everyone is using the browser in the same way (this has security benefits too).
Emacs goes completely the other way. It gives you the tools to tweak absolutely every aspect of your usage, and while it may have some defaults it isn't really opinionated about which is right. It's been said many times - emacs isn't a text editor, it's a platform on which developers can build their own ideal text editor.
That isn't to say that there aren't some silly things in the defaults, but the emacs developers appear to continue to actively tweak the defaults in the direction of being ever more sensible.
Many times I find that sensible human beings can make sensible defaults. It tends to align with software I love to use. Being opinionated is not a sin if done right. Config hell is not a solution to this problem.
The "problem" is that there are so many different use cases. There are people using emacs on strange systems for decades and their opinions vastly differ from a new user looking for a javascript environment. There are lots of opinions in emacs, and usually when you want to do something to core you find out that there's a wide swath of users who have the opposite opinion to what you were thinking. It's not a bad thing, its just tough to do anything because there are so many packages, users, expectations, ranging from 1-25 years of behavior.
I very carefully didn't say being opinionated it was a sin, in fact I said completely the opposite. That design approach has produced some brilliant stuff (e.g. anything produced by Apple).
My point was that it wasn't the ONLY approach. It appears to be the best one for mass market consumer products, but developers do so many different things in so many different ways that a different approach might be more appropriate. Based on emacs' enduring popularity with a large chunk of users, it would appear that a lot of people agree.
A lot of modern software uses the 'opinionated' approach. The designers come up with their preferred way of using the software product, and build the user experience around that. This gives great results a lot of the time - you get a consistent and unsurprising experience and you can build a very intuitive experience. To pick a silly example of this, Google Chrome tries very hard to prevent the expansion of extra 'settings'. That way everyone is using the browser in the same way (this has security benefits too).
Emacs goes completely the other way. It gives you the tools to tweak absolutely every aspect of your usage, and while it may have some defaults it isn't really opinionated about which is right. It's been said many times - emacs isn't a text editor, it's a platform on which developers can build their own ideal text editor.
That isn't to say that there aren't some silly things in the defaults, but the emacs developers appear to continue to actively tweak the defaults in the direction of being ever more sensible.