Note that that feature was in TextMate, which was Sublime's inspiration.
Multiple Selections were one of the earliest core features built for Sublime Text, and weren't inspired from other software. I don't think TextMate existed when I implemented this.
Multiple-select was indeed one of the key reasons to use it, as a programmers editor, even though it was intended for more general-purpose word processing tasks.
Anecdotal experience: my first unboxing of ST2 led to the proclamation: "finally, someone has done multi-select cursors again, almost as good as PC-Write back in the day!"
TextMate 1 had multiple column editing, but true multi caret editing was not until TextMate 2 in 2011.
... Unlike most of Sublime Text which was a close copy of TM features except for the ability for users to edit customizations, making the Sublime community a giant leech that sucked all of the air out of TextMate bundle development without ever contributing anything back.
Sad history.
Interesting. TIL
It even looks like TextMate implemented the individual copy/paste buffer for each cursor correctly as well, something that VSCode had horribly wrong the last time I tried to use it.
Do you know if this only worked with the cmd+click cursors, or did it also support the cmd+d mode to select the same word in multiple places?
Regardless, kudos to TextMate as well :)