I have thinkpad, and fortunately they still make esc big enough, so that I was not compelled to rebind.

It is more like ... when I am writing I like to stay in insert mode as long as possible - and this is where I would put the 80% of the time in vim.

Once I put on my edit/refactor hat, that is where normal-mode shines :)

And of course, special shout out to visual-selection mode.