I am both a digital creative professional and a developer/programmer and I can't remember when was the last time I pressed the escape key. If anything, it might have been to exit a full-screen video where the UI had mysteriously disappeared because some crappy website couldn't deal with an ad-blocker.

Programmers and creative professionals don't unilaterally love or need the ESC key like you're suggesting.

For me frequent usecase for ESC is to hide some popup that you opened by accident.

Like "Save As" dialog / rename file / Purchase SublimeText License / etc. In macOS you can hide many types of dialogs with ESC

That's fine but you can still do that without the physical key, can't you? I'm still able to escape out of dialogs like that without needing a physical key.

You can also type on a smartphone without a physical keyboard...

That's exactly what I mean, yall are smart, that's why I assumed yall would remap it somewhere that makes sense.

If anything, I'd remap capslock to be escape.

Ya, i've used this: https://brettterpstra.com/2017/06/15/a-hyper-key-with-karabi... to do that.

And having the hyper key is awesome (command+control+option+shift). Makes it super handy for shortcuts to open commonly used program shortcuts like calendar etc