I find it much more useful to remove the ability to even do the wrong thing, than to simply try and will myself to do the right one.
Yes, exactly. This is analogous to travelling to another country and hoping to learn the local language by immersion. If you then meet people that speak your language you run the risk of only hanging out with your little expat group and never immersing yourself in the local culture. You can end up spending years there and never learning the language.
The remaining time I would edit code like normal with vscode, so it turned out that I wasn't really able to pick up vim and use it well.
It wasn't until I switched to a different keyboard layout that I decided to move over to vim cold turkey, and was actually able to learn vim and retain it.
I felt the same way when first learning vim, since it was completely different from the code editors I'd used in the past, it was strange not being able to use the mouse in the way I was used to.