Remember that over SSH you have to send every character over the wire. If you have a slow connection you'll probably prefer editors that avoid redrawing a lot and nano fits the bill pretty well. Although since they added syntax highlighting it's getting pretty heavy.

Fair point. Personally this is why I like to use mosh[0] where possible. For a period of time, my parents had satellite Internet and unsurprisingly the latency was terrible. mosh made any remote work during my visits tolerable.

[0] https://mosh.org/