>faster ways to edit text than someone limited to what the OS provides
But other editors aren't limited to what the OS provides, they build on those basics to provide most of the same features, but in a way that's intuitive to modern users.
For example in Sublime:
>ci{ - Replace text enclosed by curly braces
Ctrl-Shift-M selects text inside brackets. Subsequent presses work outwards through layers of brackets.
>:g/\(['"]\).* \1/d - Use regex to delete every line containing a string literal
Ctrl-F Alt-R (['"]).* \1 Alt-Enter Ctrl-L Delete
>yt( - Copy characters up to the nearest (
Not available out of the box, but there are plugins for it. Although, in my experience of using vim, the mental effort of working out what character I needed for t/f tended to be far more disruptive than just using arrow keys/mouse.
Honestly that was my experience of vim in general. Whenever I had to do anything slightly non-trivial, it took a lot of mental effort to work out the exact command I needed. Whereas Sublime's multiple selections are more intuitive and flexible in unusual situations.
To use your regex example above, depending on the context, I'd probably just use Ctrl-D to step through instances of " checking whether each one is a string (which it probably is), skipping any that aren't, and then Ctrl-L Delete. (And repeat for ') If it's a short file, this is probably about as fast, it flows from muscle memory, and it means I'm actually checking through the changes I'm about to make. (And if it was a massive file, I'd use the regex. My point is just that Sublime offers a more ad-hoc way to do bulk edits where you're not exactly sure what you need to match on.)