I’ve recently decided to ditch CUA mode. It steals some shortcuts that I would like to override. One thing CUA mode did really well is allow the use of C-x for CUT and for the C-x Command Prefix. I haven’t quite figured out how to replicate this exact behavior, even finding info on how to remap C-x reliably was difficult.

The problem here is that if you remap C-x it breaks commands further down the line regardless. Instead of remapping the keys in this case you want to use keyboard-translate:

;; -- cut C-x, C-x is now C-j
(keyboard-translate ?\C-j ?\C-x)
(keyboard-translate ?\C-x ?\C-w)

This remaps Swaps C-x for C-j and puts kill-region in for for C-x.