as a long time vimmer, the advantage isn't anything to do with editing speed, people can edit quickly in most any editor these days. It's more about having this editing "language" that allows you to be pretty expressive about the edits you want to do in a precise and concise way. This Verb+noun language takes a while to learn, but when you get reasonably fluent in it, other ways of editing just feel like more work. To me, this feels like it frees up my thought process. If you imagine refactoring tools, they let you make changes that you could do at a lower level, but they just make life easy. Vims language is like a mini editing refactoring tool that combos in a lot of different ways that just feels easy once you get the hang of it.