The availability of vim in some systems is not reliable. Often only either vi or nano is available. Containers may not have even that (not that it's a good practice to edit files inside containers. It's just for experiments). Emacs meanwhile, has tramp. It lets you edit files remotely and transparently - even inside Kubernetes pods. And you still get to use all your Emacs customization.

Someone who uses vim daily will surely not struggle with vi.

You are right about that. What you will miss though, are the plugins and customization while making big edits.

Never missed that on the remote systems. The out of the box vi/vim is powerful enough for most things.

You say that, I remember when my team lead was managing a Solaris box and he asked me to take a look as Vim was not working correctly. So I moseyed over and turns out it was Vi instead of Vim. He got confused by c$ not deleting everything to the end of the line.

I would ssh into remote systems, start emacs as my first command, and do everything inside of that emacs window - editing (scripts, config files, code), running shell scripts and programs, reading man pages, executing make, compiling, etc.)

Others would use tramp mode, and open multiple remote sessions within a single emacs. This makes it easy to cut and paste between systems.