While you can definitely get a speed up from going keyboard only and mastering hotkeys, you are way faster at selecting some random block of code with the pointer and retargeting to somewhere else to paste etc until you have them solid.

For everything I write, that marginal speed improvement isn’t even close to worth the learning cost of 100% ditching the mouse. I’m bottlenecked on deciding what I want to express, almost never how quickly I can enter it into the computer. I just want it to not be a “clunky” experience, i.e. once I decide to select a block of code to move it somewhere, I want that to be painless.

For that, tabs give a nice large margin for error on the click targets, which means I can move faster.

Why do I use Emacs for almost everything? I broke my shoulder that supports my dominant hand. Seriously.

Thank God I did not break my pinky.

Indeed, sounds more like a skill issue to me ...