After about a week of using vim it clicked and I knew I couldn't go back to Sublime Text.
As for VS Code, I do everything I can to keep Microsoft products out of my life.
Statements like this are common, but they confuse two usages: (a) learning vi/vim well enough in order to use it in any unix environment vs. (b) using vim with a complete plugin/config suite as a primary development IDE replacement tool.
The former is IMHO an essential unix skill, but it's incredibly inefficient to try to use core out-of-the-box zero-plugin vim as a primary development tool. But once you start configuring an efficient dev environment, the GUI editors start to really outshine vim, and they still provide core vim functionality via plugins if you want it.
What I really meant to convey is that I dipped my toes in just enough to get familiar, and that was enough for me to get fully hooked on vim. I've spent lots of time trying to make Jetbrains/IdeaVim and VSCode/vim-plugin work for how I write code. Significantly more than I want to admit publicly...but I come back to the boring old terminal every time.
I am not trying to convince any person on this planet that they should use vim. In fact, when other developers at work ask me if they should try I say "No" 100% of the time. But Jetbrains/VSCode are a firm step down for my workflow.
My issue with Vim is remote servers and containers never have my (awesome) config.
It still pays off to know some basic Vim keybinds. You can often use them in other applications and every once in a while some machine only has vi. That said I grew up with DOS, do ctrl keybinds feel natural to me. Its just nigh annoying switching from macOS to Linux given the position of ctrl/fn/alt/super are different.