Not sure if this is bad form but i’ve always loved using jk for escape. It feels so natural to roll your index and middle fingers to get back to normal mode.

I agree, too, besides reminding myself to use numbers before movement commands there was really nothing that felt super hard about vim. It almost disappointed me, I always heard the jokes about not being able to quit it!

Yes but jk does not work in other contexts (shell vi modes at least for me) and it's actually to have Escape closer to home to quickly get out of a situation

To be fair I mostly use `/` + (n/N) + Enter with `incsearch` on (by default in nvim), I feel it's really the superior way to move around and it has deprecated a lot of my vim-fu.

In the same way, apart from occasinal `ciw` (or other text-objects), I do most of my edits with `:s/old/new`. I don't even use a complicated regex as sometimes it's just easier to write one or two simpler ones. It's just faster to not have to go to a specific location before you make an edit.