I think it’s just a memorable shared experience that a big portion of Linux users had at one point. That kind of thing is prime meme fuel. And sure, there is always a fresh supply of people who ran into it recently.

For me, I’ve been familiar with *nix for decades, but I’ve only been a daily Linux user for about a year. I remember using emacs back in my Unix days, so the sudden unexpected learning curve of vim commands is fairly recent to me. I’ve already seen like 50 variations of this meme since joining the “lol exiting vim” club, but they still amuse me.