It's not a silly question

I guess, all Emacs users will get the answer several weeks later after their first use. I am not a system administrator or hacker too. Hacker means brilliant programmer like RMS, few programmer will climb up to that status. And hacker is not a job title.
My answer to your question:
configure Emacs is not essential, you can work on it with default setting. But you CAN get a performance boost if you tweak Emacs to fit your needs.
The simplest example of configuration is alias long interactive command to short one(as you set alias in .bashrc), you see, it can save a lot of time to type

. Another a bit complex example is I like to type "s" to call a edebug step instead of the default "space".
So, the criterion of whether to configure are
"Does the change save your input time? Do you feel comfortable with the change?", one objective and another subjective, both are important.
Another guess, your next question will be
"What shall I configure in Emacs? How can I configure this and that..."