Even back in the days of Quake 1 used ESDF because it gave more comfortable options for the pinkie finger. I was confused as to why WASD was so popular until I

Even back in the days of Quake 1 used ESDF because it gave more comfortable options for the pinkie finger. I was confused as to why WASD was so popular until I learned that many keyboards had complicated limitations around how many button presses they could register simultaneously. ESDF crosses a regional boundary on the keyboard that made it easy to overflow the limits and would lead to dropped keypresses at frantic moments. WASD stays within one region and was thus was more reliable on more keyboards.