> it was a wrist destroyer for me (although I adopted the Caps-as-Ctrl very early too)
Admittedly not an option for many people, but in college I switched to Dvorak. Professionally, I spent a lot of years at companies with very weak lab computer authentication (basically just one account, shared, but it was air gapped!) and didn't want to change the keyboard settings so I became good at QWERTY again. Having used emacs on both, as a consequence, I've come to the conclusion that the emacs default bindings are better on Dvorak than QWERTY. Just the placement of the keys tends to involve fewer finger and wrist contortions, IME.
(This one enables me select, cut and type the new text - this is much faster than backspacing/selecting for me. I feel like this is a "vim pattern" that I'm reusing here)
I also have Alfred (MacOS) installed, and it saves your clipboard history. This ends up giving me sort of an Emacs-like kill ring, system wide.
I would love to record a video showing the kinds of text changes I do all the time, but the really useful happens on real life situations that one cannot record publicly.
Nowadays I mostly stick with VSCode, with a few of packages that even remind me of Emacs for selecting and transforming text.
And for the rare case of text refactoring that doesn't fit the multicursor model, there is even a fast "Open in Vim" extension/command.
(If I still wanted to use Emacs I'd probably have spent a full-month salary on a Kinesis)