I guess I'm not really sure that menus are modern. But anyway I hate the stubbornness over the vanilla emacs UI. The nonsense in the menus and the stupid pixelated pictures of scissors or whatever.
But I've never really got the idea of why emacs should appeal to less experienced users. I think that's misguided: the entire point of Emacs is that you write some emacs lisp. If you're not interested in writing any lisp, then you definitely shouldn't bother with emacs (I used emacs intensively for 20 years and am the author of Emacs packages). And if you're less experienced and looking for Idea/Sublime experience then at this point in your life there's a good chance you aren't interested in writing lisp.
But I've never really got the idea of why emacs should appeal to less experienced users. I think that's misguided: the entire point of Emacs is that you write some emacs lisp. If you're not interested in writing any lisp, then you definitely shouldn't bother with emacs (I used emacs intensively for 20 years and am the author of Emacs packages). And if you're less experienced and looking for Idea/Sublime experience then at this point in your life there's a good chance you aren't interested in writing lisp.