The real benefit of vim vs any editor is modality and there is AFAIK nothing similar in any editor even with emulators. Editing/moving over text is just way faster with vim then any other editor (not just slightly faster, light years faster). I use vscode now because vim requires A LOT of setup and even when automated its pain in the ass. VScode and its plugin sync on the other hand makes it very fast to install anywhere with your config and keys so it compensate for slower editing to me since I need to have my editor EVERYWHERE (literary hundreds of computers).
Text? Yes. Code? No. Since editing moving code is a subset of refactoring, and Vim has no knowledge about code.
"varying degrees of success" is rather short of "sufficiently to not cause problems"; in my experience they're only good enough to get into the uncanny valley of "will this work" hesitation before every keystroke outside the most common.
Better to have specialised tools for whatever they are good at than a tool that's isn't good at any, and you have to spend time cmolding it to be a pale imitation of specialised tools.
> I wouldn't want to open VSCode every time I want to write a quick note, for instance.
Why would you open VSCode? You open a note-taking app.
vim's "killer feature" is its text editing language and modality. But plenty of other editors and IDEs offer vim emulation to varying degrees of success. So this can't be the reason to use (neo)vim-the-binary as my editor over, e.g., VSCode.
So for me the real advantage of vim is in its flexibility. I can make vim into whatever I want depending on the context. Because of this, I'm able to use the same vim in many different contexts, instead of having different tools for different tasks. Ironically, this is kind of like the emacs culture of doing everything inside of emacs.
For example, vim is my code editor, of course. But I also have a keybinding to pop up my wiki and immediately start editing a note in vim. I have another keybinding I use when I'm writing a long piece of text in a textbox (like now) -- the binding drops me into vim, I write my text, and when I exit the contents of the buffer are immediately copied to the clipboard for pasting into the textbox. In each of these contexts, I have access to the same familiar environment with all of my configuration, keybindings, etc.
I could probably wrangle VSCode into doing each of these things, but it would be clunky. Vim owes much of its flexibility to its lightweight terminal interface. I wouldn't want to open VSCode every time I want to write a quick note, for instance.