I liked all this stuff when I coded as a hobby. Now that it’s my job, I like VSCode because I never need to tinker with it to any significant extent and I can focus on getting my work done. I fire up vim occasionally if I need to do some fancy regexp munging.
I also find it highly amusing when people talk about needing to get work done and Vim, I mean I didn't get staff at one of the highest paying, hardest companies to climb at because I was sitting there tweaking configs instead of having impact. Vim lets me have impact by getting out of my way and letting me do precisely what I need to do wherever I need to do it.
The part of your post that I responded to talked about exploring highly tinkerable projects. I guess you’re saying that you like that Vim is explorable and tinkerable even though you don’t waste time exploring it or tinkering with it. That’s fair enough, but I hope you can at least see the sentiment that I was responding to.