I've been working with the command line for just under two decades. A couple of years of those were spent with vim as my primary editor, but eventually I moved to Sublime and never looked back.

But I still use the command line heavily in all my work. I usually have a konsole window that I alt+tab into whenever I need to build or run tests, instead of using Sublime's "build system" support. The only time I use vim is when I need to ssh, or am using Termux on my phone.

> The proper argument here, probably, is this one: the terminal, with its way of combining small CLI tools into pipelines, covers infinitely many use cases,

Extensible GUI tools (Sublime, VSCode, etc) cover infinitely many use cases too, except they offer more reliable and reproducible runtime environments.

I think the reason these types of discussions never die is because people in general tend towards closed mindedness. It's hard to put yourself in other people's shoes, and even harder to entertain the possibility that you're wrong.

But at the end of the day this only matters for novices. After enough experience with them, no matter what you use, your productivity bottleneck isn't going to be your tools (unless its ed...).