> The 100% full reason for me was that I had a job where I needed to SSH into our prod server

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.