Multiple cursors are a lot better than :s for you standard search and replace, unless you have a really big file at which point helix gets to slow (which isn't that common) but there are a lot of other stuff you can do with ex commands.

I use :make pretty often, vim ships with the ability to parse a lot of compiler/linter outputs out of the box so if you tell it which one with :compiler you get build errors in the quickfix list. I also use :grep a lot. You can do <space>/ to grep in helix but I often find that I want to add command line options to only search in specific directories or for specific file types (we have a large codebase at work). Being able to filter results with :Cfilter, and being able to go back to old quickfix results with :colder is also really nice. Finally, you can use :cdo to apply ex commands to stuff you've matched in the quickfix list.

As an example, if you get a build error because you've renamed a variable in one file but not the places it gets referenced in other files, you can :make to get the build errors in you quickfix list, :Cfilter to narrow it down to only that specific class of error if needed and then do :cdo s/oldName/newName/g to rename the variable in all places that cause errors. You can then go back to the list of all errors with :colder and handle other errors in another way if needed.

I'll have to admit that I don't do this that often so honestly I wouldn't lose out on that much switching to helix (after it gets proper plugin support and someone makes a decent replacement for the fugitive git plugin) but I would feel less powerful not knowing that I have those tools up my sleave lol.

Sais no-one that knows vim, thou it have a vi-like mode that is missing most advanced vi-trixs.