I'm new to Linux, and pretty new to Vim, but for me personally it works because of a couple of reasons:

(i) speed. yes, it's faster once you spent a little bit of time getting used to it. Vim movements or motions just make so much more sense in my mind, and being able to do all of them with few keystrokes feels pretty good and saves time.

(ii) comfort / muscle memory. This kind of ties to (i), where I just feel comfortable with my hands staying roughly at the same place on the keyboard the entire time I'm editing or writing something. Jumping here and there, deleting and copy-pasting, search/search-and-replace, creating-using-erasing macros, etc; things just feel so crisp and effortless.

(iii) simplicity. It is a terminal-based text editor, and so for me it's distraction-free. I just want to open up a text file and edit some stuff or even do some bit of writing, and I don't really feel like opening up a GUI text editors just to edit some stuff, or even write some stuff! I use Vim to write almost everything and it feels really good.

But when it comes down to it, anything like Kate or Notepadqq or any generic text editor works just fine.