That’s how I use Escape too in Evil Emacs/Spacemacs. There is some funky default in Spacemacs where you can hit something like d+f in rapid succession in order to enter normal mode but I didn’t find it to be worth it.

People really like the home row but (1) I think it is fine to leave it once in a while and (2) my joints don’t like stay in a very static position for too long in any case.

Disagree with Esc being in a good spot but having dabbled with the "workman" keyboard layout can confirm its quite lovely having backspace as caps. I often wonder about making capslock backspace, and original backspace becoming Escape. Since I already have strong muscle memory to stretch to backspace...