There is visual mode in vim too you know. That's for doing exactly what you describe. I use that when I'm unsure about the movement I need for an action.
The reality is, you change the way you think about editing. It took about a week away from vim but eventually I could see the selections in realtime. Not as a gimmick like with multicursor vim, but as the basis of everything. I have been using it exclusively for 2 years and haven't looked back once. Single-cursor editing is about the same speed, but selection oriented editing blows vim out of the water with anything with 2 or more edits.
It's like if a notepad user said "what's the point of vim? I can just use a mouse and arrow keys??" Vim changes the way you see things - you see a space separated word so you use W or a line with whitespace at the beginning so you use I. It's hard to explain other than you change your understanding of editing.
Edit: that gimmick comment might annoy some people. I used to use it and love it. But the reality is, it was just an add-on to an already-grest editor. After my plugin phase of vim, I realised it didn't really add much at all. So 'gimmick' is probably too harsh
Vim has all the tools necessary to achieve the same end result with the same convenience. [0]
Just thinking about what crazy things I've done with macros that multi-cursor would be incapable of handling makes me chuckle.
vim doesn't need the fancy features of other editors (except for maybe LSP and tree-sitter for a more IDE-like experience).
The core problem is that you don't grok vi [1] which is fine, not everyone has time and passion for that. But please don't think for a moment that vim is inferior just because it doesn't blindly copy other editors features.
[0] https://engagor.github.io/blog/2018/02/21/why-vim-doesnt-nee... [1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118
Both of which neovim has.
Agree with your premise, though: (n)vim does not need multi-cursor selection, for the reasons have given.
Golfing is not the best representation of day to day text editing, but I must say that optimal Kakoune solutions are usually pretty close to normal workflow.