> can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim, let alone enough people to make th at the debate.

Because vim generally offers everything vi has.

vi does have one advantage though. It's a lot lighter. vim is like 5.4MiB in size with 82 shared library dependencies, while vi[1] is like 260KiB with 2 library dependencies (libc and ncurses).

[1] https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/

For resource constrained systems, don't overlook busybox vi.

https://k.japko.eu/busybox-vi-tutorial.html