In what circumstances would you run `vi` and find yourself upset that you end up in `vim`?
It’s a basic infrastructure that you don’t want to break.
I think "if the script worked before, I want it to work later" has much more practical weight. Though, on the other side of practicality, I've heard sed, awk, and perl suggested for manipulating text in bash scripts far more than I've heard of vi recommended for the task.