I'm in a similar boat. It's become my primary editor but I still open VSCode everytime I need search-and-replace or an easy git-blame.

For unselect, if I'm understanding correctly, ; will unselect with your cursor at the end of the selection, Alt-; will unselect and move your cursor back to the beginning.

This.

I tried it out for a few days, and I cannot justify spending time on this when I am already very productive with vim/VSCodeVim. Helix is nice in many ways but not worth switching over