Do you think that figuring out vim is a good use for people who are probably time limited anyway and are trying to build useful skills? Using a vi clone is a lifestyle choice, not an employable skill. Frankly, so is nano or anything else that asks them to abandon the skills they may have developed for navigating their computing environment.

Computers are hard. Websites are complicated.

Learning vim is more of an obstacle than using Notepad++ and FileZilla would be.

As a beginner, you know only enough to pass by. You can do a lot with just passing by, so long as you don't bump into places you can't get yourself out of. "Just enough command line and vi to edit a file" is a bit magic, but plenty of the other stuff involved is going to be as opaque.

I think the skillset of "learn how to write websites in a short time" is going to involve some level of "here's this stuff I have to do in just the right way" anyway.

I think it depends on the situation. In my case, learning Vim was quite beneficial as I had to maintain servers along with backend development. For any frontend development, starting with a modern IDE will be any day faster than Vim.

being able to edit files on a remote server is not an employable skill? most unix servers will have vi or vim as lowest common denominator editor

Learning vim is 1% of skills at most. If these people can’t really afford to learn vim, how can they can learn I don’t know, React or Django.

(I think Vim is employable: being able to quickly edit a file in any Unix-like environment is very helpful. But that’s off topic.)

Anyway, if nano is not good enough there are hundreds of other decent editors available. My point is: “VS Code is good because vim is hard” is a very weak argument. VS Code is good, no doubt. But if it a teacher forces students to use Vim, and students have problems with Vim, then the problem is not in lack of VS Code.