I think a huge reason people find this difficult is that it's being presented alongside a whole bunch of other ideas. Even the fairly minimalistic vimtutor goe

I think a huge reason people find this difficult is that it's being presented alongside a whole bunch of other ideas. Even the fairly minimalistic vimtutor goes off the rails after lesson 1. Most of the stuff in that tutorial could wait until you've been using vim for a month or longer. Learn the movement keys, learn to enter and exit insert mode, learn to delete text, and learn to save and quit. Trying to learn that and at the same time trying to learn about how commands are composed of actions and motions, or how to use plugins, or buffers, or regex, or anything else, is going to cause you to stumble over the basics.