Build times in nodejs are not so great in even medium size projects if you make heavy usage of advanced typescript features - either yourself or through libraries like zod. So if something makes the nodejs runtime faster, it could potentially make ts compiler faster too - for which I'd be very grateful.
Vim has a rich ecosystem of plugins like easymotion which allow you to jump directly to different parts of the current file with minimal keystrokes. There are vscode extensions like Jumpy and Acejump which provide a similar keyboard-driven cursor jumping support for vscode.
I highly recommend trying out one of these if you haven't already. Once you get habituated to easymotion, you wonder how you survived without this so long.
I don't use it right now, but two years ago I helped a team incrementally adopt Kotlin in a ten year old java/spring/mybatis codebase. We didn't have any android experience and in the initial few months mostly used kotlin as a better java, avoiding features that would prevent us from switching back to java if needed.
But it worked pretty well - we didn't face much resistence from people experienced with java because they could still continue to benefit from their jvm familiarity, and the language was approachable to new folks who joined us. It also helped that we could just copy paste java code into a .kt file and intellij would convert it to kotlin.
We didn't venture into kotlin's js/native targets but for jvm it worked out great for us.
I also have been using httpie for a few years - it is really great.
Recently I have started using nushell which has a similar module builtin: https://www.nushell.sh/commands/docs/http_get.html Combined with rest of the nicities in nushell its a pretty good cli experience.
Lounge looks pretty cool