I think you've touched on it, but I'm going try to take it one step further into explicitness.

Just over a year ago I decided to switch to Neovim. The reason for switching was personal; I was struggling with what I'll call "clutter" in other tools and I wanted a tool that would reinforce, at least lightly, a mode of working that promoted focus on what I was working on, while making it easy to reference other files without loading up my editor with tabs and other visual clutter (buttons/menus) I don't care about most of the time.

I took the advice I seemed to bump into repeatedly: try out vim mode in my current editor before making the plunge.

I really struggled at first. It felt wildly foreign. All the shortcuts were nowhere near to the world I was familiar with.

As I was about to give up, I ran into some advice that was along the lines of "stop trying to memorize shortcuts and start thinking in terms of what you want to achieve" (words and motions in vim-speak).

Your example of [C]hange [I]nner is a great one; that one in particular was life changing. Sure there are some words and motions that do require memorization, but so many others just flow naturally. And once you start thinking in actions, it's easy to see how they can layer on top of each other in really elegant ways.

I'm not even here trying to tout vim-like editors, I'd wager there are many editors that have some semblance of this kind of interaction, but rather to reiterate there's a shift from a PoV of function vs. goal.

Again, I don't think this is "the right way" but rather one of many perspectives that works in context with the phenomenology of me.