I've used vim, emacs w/evil mode, and currently use VSCode with vim plugin.

The editor itself doesn't really matter.

Learning mode based editing with vim key bindings absolutely is.

You get like 90% of the benefit that brings with any editor that has good support for vim style interaction.

I still regularly use nvim in my terminal for quick edits here and there, but do my development in VSCode and spend a lot less time managing a config/plugins/etc.

My one suggestion is to change your escape binding to something like 'kj' or an easily accessible two letter sequence that doesn't appear in English text. Your fingers will thank you for it (even if it makes using default setups on systems you don't control a bit disconcerting for 30 seconds).