If you, like most people, spend most of your time entering text, then it is factually correct that you must exit the text-entry mode to do anything else.
And do you know why this arrangement exists? Because there were teletype terminals and early glass terminals that didn't have control keys. No control keys, no way to exploit their existence. SO there had to be a magic character to switch from text entry to control mode. And the magic character was an ordinary character, sometimes used for text entry, sometimes interpreted as a command prefix.
Keyboards have changed, but vi hasn't. Computers have mice and touch-sensitive displays, but vi can't exploit them. Operating systems have clipboards, but vi can't take advantage of that convention. You know -- don't get me started.