When I see colleagues using their editor of choice, they’re typically only using the basic features. The pro features that significantly speed up your editing flow remain undiscovered.

When I point out a faster way to accomplish a certain thing that is typically found in all editors, which often even is placed behind the same keyboard shortcut, they’re like “oh, that’s cool, I didn’t know you could do that!”. And that’s without me knowing or having used that specific editor.

So I’d say it’s the people, not vi, as it applies just as well to other editors or IDEs.

Vi (or emacs) have steep learning curve with immense benefits for rest of a programmer/editor life.