I'm only slightly older than Vim itself (but much younger than vi), but I've used it for virtually my whole career. The one thing the author's missing is the real reason every Vim user uses it:

Vim is not an editor. It's a language. A text-editing language.

When I'm editing, I'm thinking things like:

- change these 2 words: "c2w"

- remove everything in these parentheses: "di)"

- delete this line: "dd"

- where is this declared: "gd" (this is a custom CoC.vim mapping)

Any editor implementing that language would probably see very good adoption in Vim user circles (e.g nvim).