+1 and a recommendation for vimium browser extension.

basically, whatever allows increased rate of I/O between you and a computer.

it's really as simple as never leaving the home row and im pretty close to thinking that the mouse as an input device has held people back.

Yes, I learned vim recently because I was far-away with a shitty netbook and a project fell into my hands. Having a shit computer, a modern dev environment wouldn't work, so I learned a lot of vim while coding it.

Nowadays I'm using VSCode because it has many many features not available on vim (or available with plugins with a large learning curve that I can't have right now) but I always use vim mode. I can't imagine not being able to navigate like vim and have now added vim-like bindings/commands to some other programs like Firefox.

I agree. When first learning Vim the learning curve is very steep for what feels like basically advanced cursor moving but with more experience it becomes a very powerful text editor. Last week another I had a 10,000 line file that was the output of a bash command with two columns and each column was in quotes. I needed to remove the first column and the quotes around the second column. There are many ways to do it but all I had to do was open up vim and type `qaA<backspace><esc>T"d0jq` and `10000@a` and cleaned it right up.