Do distros still come with original vi? My understanding is that when you type 'vi' you get a minimal version of vim on most (all?) distros theses days.

'vi' is still 'vi' in OSX, and I believe the "original" 'vi' is accessible as 'nvi' on the usual Linux distros. (e.g., https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/nvi)

nvi is new vi, released as part of 4.3BSD-net2. The only place I have encountered original vi is on Solaris. Solaris vi does horrible things like crashing if you maximize your xterm too big...

Can you highlight what differences make you choose vi over vim?

I think the comment is about vi scoring better on “lack of features” than vim, not about preferring vi over vim.

Of course, ed beats that, and the combination of cat and echo with redirection beats that (for a very limited definition of ‘editor’)