I agree with you wholeheartedly but I wanted to elaborate in a complimentary direction to your point, I think the benefits of knowing how to navigate only using a keyboard with Vim (which importantly is much less prone to RSI than something like emacs or mouse centric workflows for most people) gives a programmer are the same as they do for someone writing a book in markdown using vim.

When you describe the advantage of vim's modal keybindings and navigation, it sounds like you are describing an advantage in speed but it is really like a decrease in executive function load about the how which frees you up to think farther ahead and consider more interesting questions... kind of like how people describe the mystical power of AI except not bullshit, just a basic benefit to tooling that slots into your body mechanics and mind like a finely tuned instrument... but at the same time nobody NEEDs to learn vim. If you don't like it, forget it, what we are saying is don't bash it without understanding the beauty to Vim style keybindings independent of any particular software including vim or vi themselves.