This is exactly my path to it, and even though I know how to “eat flaming death” vi and used emacs for awhile, nano is still my default “edit that config file quickly”.

Same. My first internet access was a BSD shell account back in 1993; I had Pine and Pico on there. Coming from a world of MS-DOS BBSes (I ran one myself!) it wasn't that hard to take QEdit skills and move that over to using Pine and Pico-- it was quite comfortable.

I still tend to muscle memory my way through using Nano when I need to do quick file edits on Linux.