It's worse than that, it's a religion. Many of them truly seem to believe they're achieving a higher "hacker rank" or something, while most of it is just tedium and very low level learning.
It's rarely learning huge, game changing concepts. Frequently it's just chasing obscure docs to obscure forums to obscure repos for stuff some PhD student half baked a decade ago on their way to their biochemistry thesis.
Guess what, I work in DevOps, that's just my dayjob, anyway, I don't want to do it as a hobby in Vim, too :-))
And I say this as an "also Vim user". I.e. I use Vim and I've used it for more than a decade, just not exclusively, best tool for the job and all that.
It can definitely lead you down all sorts of twisty paths if you look at other people's elaborate configs and decide to do that sort of stuff yourself but it's very pleasant/low-maintenance if you stick to the basics (meaning roughly what people do with VSCode). It takes me roughly a few minutes to configure Neovim for a new language :)
(Of course, there's some other stuff in my init.lua that I've put there for fun, like clipboard and window management scripts, but that's not strictly necessary. I've spent a bit more time figuring out the Lua API to write these, but I personally think it's worth it for the extra ability to mold the editor to my needs).
One of the tips in The Pragmatic Programmer is "Achieve Editor Fluency", wherever it's Vim, VS Code, or Sublime Text. I use IDEA for java code because in my job, I browse code more often than I edit it, and IDEA is nice for that. I also use WebStorm for the JS part because it's also good for that. But I invested my time into VIM because I can do everything above with it and even more. I don't want my editor to become an IDE, I want it to be powerful in editing and allow for integration, as there are slews of tools that work with code and text.
You should invest in your tools, be it Vim or VS Code. I chose Vim and Sublime Text because of their speed, and JetBrains' IDEs because of their code analysis engine. You may have different criteria, but try to follow the tip.
What I'm perturbed by are the people who take it to extremes, and are happy to spend hours a week tweaking things, and can't fathom someone else might not enjoy doing the same.
The people who _enjoy_ the toil seem to truly struggle to comprehend that someone might not want to spend hours upon hours learning how to get things working, only to immediately forget.