The trouble with that is that it shows a certain amount of respect

You know, you may have just changed my mind

Feel free to ping me if I can help, at least in the form of starter configs/small hacks that emulate VS Code workflows or something :)

Personally I was the guy that had thousands of lines of Vim and Emacs configurations, so I really had to do this to manage the time sink (like you I had a stint with VS Code in between that eventually stopped working for me)

Takes a second to get used to the keybindings but after about ~2w you can painlessly switch back and forth between vim and helix pretty much instantly

Skip the masochism, try helix. Switched to that + zellij with about 20 lines of config and never looked back