Not sure how others do it, but on standard keyboards I've always struggled with accurately moving my hands; for example one journey to the arrow cluster and back meant my right hand usually landed on the wrong row or column if I wasn't looking. All issues of that kind just disappeared when I started using a keyboard actually designed for human hands and reduced hand/wrist movement.
But the reason custom keyboards exist is exactly because different people want different things, and that's fine.
To the best of my memory, I just accurately moved my hands even as far as the \| or =/+ keys. Using arrow keys would've required quickly feeling for the arrow-key cluster before using it.
Now that I'm on a split keyboard with a reduced number of keys, I think people vastly discount how difficult/awkward it is to accurately use the standard keyboard layout for programming without looking at the keyboard.