> the best _text editor_

Code is text. So it is good to have a very good text editor for manipulating it as text. But code is also very different from plain text. It is highly structured. When I think about code I think about it as some kind of syntax tree (call hierarchies etc) . I don't think about it as character buffers. So if I am programming and I can have something that supports good text editing but also good tree editing then I will take that over something that only does good text editing.

I agree with this. I have never been a vim/neovim/helix user, so there's little I can contribute here. But I have always used paredit commands as much as possible, in all languages, not just lisps, and that's still true now that I've switched to vscode from emacs. I'm curious whether any vim/helix editing operations are "tree-based" in a similar way to paredit, and also whether anyone's building a paredit-like editing system based on treesitter.