vi is a sysadmin's dream. I use it for editing any and all files on myriad remote machines. I especially love the ! command which lets me pipe parts of a buffer through shell commands such as column.
It seems like "perform a bunch of pretty similar changes across most lines of a file with a couple hundred lines" is the kind of thing that shows up far more regularly for sysadmins than for programmers, and it's something where vim shines. The last time I worked somewhere with someone in an explicit "sysadmin" role, they were regularly bugging me for vim tips (not that I minded).
I thought IDEs were a programmer's dream :D
If my only use were editing files in CLI, though, I'd have always used nano and not learned vim, as well.