The description you gave of the actions one takes in editing makes sense: in most non-modal editors, you select the text you want to take actions on, then choose the action to take. But, I can do that in literally every modeless editor! That's the way essentially all of them work.
But when people write of "Vim as a text editing language" as many comments here do, the action -> object model -- again, at least for me -- fits the pattern. We say "I'm going to the store," not "store I'm going to," unless Yoda we are. And, most programming languages that aren't purely object-oriented tend to follow a rough pattern of "action(parameter)". So in editors like Sublime Text (or VSCode or BBEdit or...) I tend to do editing in an entirely visual way, Vim approaches editing in a more language-based way, and when you describe edits in language, "[verb] the [noun]" is pretty natural.