The existence of vim classic would be hard to explain without reference to LLMs.
That advice was not entirely accurate (sometimes vi is in /usr/bin/vi, for example), and the merging of /bin with /usr/bin has made it kind of a moot point. (EDIT to add: Though the fact that busybox includes a basic vi implementation has kind of un-mooted the point, actually). But I first started learning vi because I figured I would need it professionally, and when the modal-editing workflow "clicked" for me, I figured out that I had just learned the editor I would want to stick with for years.
And although vim replaced vi and nvim replaced vim in my finger-macros, that has remained true to this day.
You don't need emacs on a server. TRAMP is built-in and can open remote files in a local instance over SSH, SMB, FTP, ADB, or docker/podman.
As an extreme example, today I needed to combine parts of two files into one and decided that
cat foo bar > foobar && mv foobar bar && vim bar
EDIT: Found http://www.fifi.org/doc/tramp/tramp-emacs.html which mentions that TRAMP started development in November 1998. I would have been getting that advice in late 1997 or early 1998, given when I started my Unix class at college. So the answer appears to be that the advice was actually correct at the time, but superseded sooner than I thought it was.
Of course, if your problem is "/usr won't mount", then it's likely that the ftp server isn't running either, so the advice still makes sense.
Also, I have not been following the d2d development of vim closely after Bram's passing but I can't help but wonder what he'd have thought about this approach to development of vim.
Seems like an interesting fact for those who don't follow the development of vim/neovim.