The advice you'll hear most often, these days, is to start with Doom emacs. Spacemacs is another option, you'll have to do some digging around to figure out why one vs. the other; all I know is that the energy around 'vim keybindings for emacs' has shifted to Doom.

The advantage of using one of those over something like prelude + evil, is that the whole community tends to use the vim bindings, so all the supplementary material is oriented toward that sort of input, and your chances of getting questions answered goes way up.