I was in the same position as you initially and it took a week or two to get the muscle memory but it's so smooth to navigate using keys near the home row compared to arrow keys.
the keys prelude pushes you towards with guru-mode are not the ones on the home row (hjkl, which is justifiable) but keys originally chosen for english words: n(ext), p(revious), f(orward), b(ack). It's mystifying, these aren't ergonomic at all, but just memnomics to help teach navigation _in the absence of clearly marked arrow keys_. So if anything, rather than being for gurus, these are keys for beginners.
Dug out a quote from Guy Steele on why the key bindings in emacs got this way:
[...] not being a human-factors guy at all, I
didn't think at all about convenience for touch typists. I was
principally concerned with mnemonic value. And so that's why Meta-C and
Meta-L and Meta-U stand for capitalize and lowercase and uppercase.
Plus those keys work in bash shells (anything that uses readline) and a lot of other places too.
Not only that but, the basic forward/back char, up/down line are caveman style navigation. Obviously they come in useful, but emacs has a much richer set of navigation options: M-f, M-b move forward/back by words, M-}, M-{ by paragraphs etc.
Amazingly... arrow keys also work in bash/zsh etc. shells, back to the late 80s. :-)
Actually back then I used tcsh first because it was the one that commonly had niceties like.. arrow keys.
In shell, I use the emacs bindings for kill-buffer, incremental search, and end of line jump, etc. but arrow keys for cursor movement. I suspect most people who aren't using vi bindings are much the same.
To me the ctrl-n/ctrl-p thing is a piece of ideology, not practicality; as sibling comment pointed out, they are not really ergonomic, and really just date to the fact that various terminals did not have consistent arrow navigations at various point.
Actually I did get used to ctrl-p/ctrl-n in the context of an old MUD client I used to use (TinyFugue, actually I still use it sometimes). It used those bindings for history cycling. And the MOO client I used in emacs also used ESC-p for similar purposes, I recall.
In all the web browsers I've tried on Windows, Mac and Linux, up and down arrow scroll a little (roughly a twelfth of a page) and people spend more time in browsers than in editors.
I'm no exception, which is why I customized my editor to make the up and down arrow keys behave like they do in browsers. That means I would like to use some other pair of keys in my editor to move to the next line or previous line. Since there does not seem to be any convention for the choice of those 2 keys more entrenched than Emacs's convention of using ctrl-n and ctrl-p, that is what I use.
Like you, I am annoyed by comments that gush about how great it is for programs other than Emacs to interpret Emacs-specific keyboard shortcuts because in VSCode, the editor used by about 70% of the world's programmers, none of the Emacs-specific shortcuts work: e.g., ctrl-n / ctrl-p don't move to the next / previous line.
I find them incredibly ergonomic, at least compared to the arrow keys, but that's just me. My newest keyboard doesn't even have arrows keys due to how little I would use them.
It interferes with my thinking mode - right hand on the mouse and probably scrolling in docs on the other screen, left hand stroking my beard.
More seriously, I'm just the same with hjkl and vim - cool if it works for you, when I am scrolling through I don't need to be efficient (which is highly subjective anyway), I need to have it how I like it.
I was in the same position as you initially and it took a week or two to get the muscle memory but it's so smooth to navigate using keys near the home row compared to arrow keys.