You can do the Vim approach just fine, and I usually do. I write prose in kak for goodness' sake, I don't usually have multiple cursors for that. The only time I accidentally get extra selections, besides old muscle memory triggering that feature in search with shift-N, is when I accidentally click in the terminal, which was going to mess me up with any editor.

But occasionally it's very nice to actually have that multiple selection feature. For instance, suppose you have a search and replace that you only want to do on certain instances of your search, in a context dependent way. You could just use n and . repeatedly. However, I find it nicer to examine each selection, drop the inappropriate ones individually, recheck my work, then do all the edits at once. This also eliminates (granted, by defining it away) the problem of changing your mind halfway through the search process about what change you want to make. When you change your mind, your cursor is either still live in all the places, or you're done, in which case at least there's only one thing to search for again, not the half that were changed and the half you hadn't reached yet.