Which ones? All I see is just a handful of distinct commands. Those commands take arguments, and they are called with those arguments over and over again, but there's very little magic in the article. And, in fact, very little of the commands available to and regularly used by Vim user were shown. (And I think this was the point of the article.)

It's like you were arguing that printf("foo\n") and printf("bar\n") were some fundamentally different magic incantations in C that you need to remember separately.

That's right. You've made a great point. Learning vim is like learning a new language. Which isn't trivial for most people as exemplified by software like nano and the new micro.