EDIT: for those that don't know:
qa type in some stuff including cr and a return to be beginning of the line
233@a replay macro 233 times.
I did learn a lot of things from the video, but I agree that a macro might have served them better.
Everything else something like vscode already provides.
The deal is the kind of text heavy lifting tasks that truly use the power of macros are rare in most modern programming practice. In fact if you are writing repeated patterns of code you are likely doing something very wrong.
Emacs is special in the case that basically all Emacs commands can be automated.
Long back I had written a Twitter thread(Which I now lost), which tried to capture all kinds of editing patterns for you could use macros to go from O(something_crazy) to O(1) equivalent of editing tasks.
I'm a sysadmin, not a rockstar like you coding types. I edit config files, and (lately) edit .csv's for management so excel can show them what they want to see.
My servers are a mix of AIX/RHEL/FreeBSD. I'm stuck with AIX for all the 'important stuff' so usually need to copy the files over to a RHEL box so I can atleast use a modern incarnation of vim over vi.
We are all the same :) Me started working on Solaris boxes, in fact that's how I learned to use vi well. When all you have is a man page and vi, you tend do RTFM really really well and use it.
vi does support macros. Do try.
I've yet to see vscode get an equivalent for
% ! some-filtering-command