Yeah. A lot of people who use vim don’t know how to use the full power of vi. They’ll often install plugins to do things they could have easily done with built in features!
The one area where regular vi sucks though is undo. If you want multiple undo then you’ll have to at least go with something like nvi.
I don’t really recommend people learn vi/vim even though I’ve been using it for years and love it. It’s a very personal thing and the time you invest into learning it might not be worth it if you don’t use its features enough.
I think it’s dependent on your personality and neurodivergence/neurotypical characteristics (I don’t know a word that encompasses all of this). If you’re the type of person who gets really annoyed/distracted by any sort of “friction” in the editing process then I think you may be a good candidate to learn vi. Otherwise probably not!
I sometimes wonder why some programmers don't use vim. Aren't they lazy enough to be bothered about unnecessary work and "friction" you have to deal with when using ordinary editors. I'd rather do the interesting parts of the job and command the computer to do the rest. Of course the communication with the computer has to be as concise, as effortless, and as easy as possible.
For me (sysadmin actually) it's because what I'm doing is either simple enough that I can use Nano (editing simple config files) or complicated enough that I'll want a full fledged IDE. I use VSCode and it handles remote files really really well.
Although I have learned a little bit of Vi/Vim because sometimes thats all you have.
Plus if you're doing major changes (like more than editing a line or two) you shouldn't be doing that on a production server anyways. Like if I found out an engineer or dev was primarily working directly off of the server they would probably be on their way out the door. Uptime is worth way too much for that nonsense.
I get that for sure, but you can still use it only for specific tasks like org-mode LaTeX. It was literally made by some astronomer/astrophysicist to make writing LaTeX easier.
I never had any issues writing LaTeX with vim. I used UltiSnips and wrote a bunch of my own snippets for it. I also wrote a lot of my own macros in LaTeX.