Have you heard of/tried using Helix [0]?

It’s a modal editor, so the basic vi/vim motions are of course there almost by necessity, but then it does a drastic shift to actions that were indeed engineered and thought-through intentionally, instead of being made up long ago and then accepted as gospel (love the analogy, by the way).

It’s now my favorite editor by far (not just because of how you use it to shuffle text around, but that is a big part of it), and has solved many of the gripes I had had with trying not to learn the basics, but getting really “at home” with standard vi/vim/neovim controls.

Your example would be <g-h> and <g-l> instead of 0 and $, which I find highly intuitive: Reuse the known left/right motion for a character, and prepend it with a “goto” to signify the whole line.

[0] https://helix-editor.com, also see default keymap: https://docs.helix-editor.com/keymap.html