whataboutism – as long as you’re distracted by “China!”, you aren’t paying attention to the far more egregious privacy violations happening right here at home
another consideration is how much actual writing do you normally do? do you live with both hands on the keyboard? or do you spend as much time with one hand on the keyboard, one hand on the mouse? do you spend more time in front of a graphics tablet only using the keyboard for shortcuts?
if you’re a writer or author, optimizing your layout makes perfect sense
but if you spend significant time with a mouse (or trackball or trackpad or trackpoint), then realize you’re going to have to spend a significant portion of time figuring out your shortcuts – you’re either going to have to learn the new positions or go through and remap the hotkeys in each of your applications – ex. with InDesign, keeping the modifiers close together and accessible by one hand is going to take priority so you can do stuff like Ctrl-Alt-Shift-C, Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E
[side note: one of the advantages of Colemak/Colemak-DH is they left A, Z, X, C, V untouched because of shortcuts and people’s muscle memory]
(horizontal scroll isn’t quite the same)