their choice to subtly diverge from the vim way of things is actually super nice, somehow way more mnemonic and easy to remember and use everyday
Edit: here's my Helix keymaps, they're in Nix but that's pretty straightforward to port to JSON: https://codeberg.org/jcdickinson/nix/src/branch/main/home/co...
I find the helix model of select then act so much more aligned to my mental model. Rather than verb then noun in vim.
Vim register handling on deletion is pure crap. (delete a line lands into a different register than delete a word, pasting over a selection overrides the default register etc.).
There is one plugin in vim that I cannot live without though, and that is easymotion (there are other similar plugins). It highlights objects with a letter (like the start of words for example), pressing the letter jumps to the object. I find this so much more natural and easier than jumping to line numbers. I might have to implement this into helix ;)