Multi-cursors can be nice, but a sufficiently powerful implementation of that looks like helix or kakoune, and those are at least as complex as vim, if not more.
When you're good at vim, it is invisible. Once you're good at writing macros, you can do stuff which is impossible with Sublime-style multi cursors.
I assume those are situations where the author would have "just written a quick script," but vim macros are an interactive scripting language specifically designed to tersely express text transformations. Your script is never going to be quicker than that.
I'm not saying this as a vim partisan or anything. You could easily argue that vim over-optimizes and saves little time in the grand scheme—that's a fair critique. But it's strange to insist that complex tools are complex only for the sake of complexity. It's a weirdly conspiracist mindset.