> The article talks about this from the users side, how there is a class of user who enjoys learning all of these “extra” features, even though they ultimately provide less value than the core features.

With Vim, Emacs, Git,... there's a core concept that all those extras get backs to. The issue with normal editor is that their concept of a text file is an array of lines of characters. Some goes further with providing some parsing to further isolate things like strings or symbols.

With Vim, there's the buffer (aka the content), the window (where user view the content), the cursor (which is the point of origin of many actions) and various commands that moves the cursor according to what's in the buffer. Like with the hand, you can draw, write, make dough, play the piano,..., you use the same hand, you don't have to replace it to do any other actions, you only taught yourself how to do it.

Same with git. It has a core concept that encapsulate everything to do with versioning text files, you just have to compose them to do what you want.

This kind of conceptual simplicity, even though the interfacing may be rough, is good because you are solving classes of problems instead of solving them one at time. For a particular problem, you only need to switch configurations, not to learn a new tool.

The issue is when you tackle a bunch of features not related to each other, or simplify the model so much that it's a toy instead of a tool.