I am no vim god but I have a different experience. I've installed quite a few plugins (e.g. nerdtree, airline etc) but they are mostly cosmetic and I myself do

I am no vim god but I have a different experience. I've installed quite a few plugins (e.g. nerdtree, airline etc) but they are mostly cosmetic and I myself don't do much vimscript other than some basic .vimrc. But I do have most of the content of any vim cheatsheet burned into muscle memory and can come up with combination of them on the fly. I also use :norm extensively when I need to quickly batch edit anything. I never really did encounter scenarios where the logic are so complex that I'd rather write vimscript to solve it - at worst, I'd do a macro, but combination of modal keys are usually enough. I think I find a sweet spot between using vim to its maximum utility and less about using vim for the sake of vim. I have a quick install script for everything I depend on and one thing I found extremely valuable is the ability to pull, install and have the same editor customized and familiar in any computer, virtual or real, it even works on Windows (WSL).