> Curious if you use the command palette much
Yes, definitely (I use Cmd-Shift-P a lot, which should be the same thing? I also use Sublime so that shortcut being the same is valuable), but more for things I need to do relatively rarely, as it's an order of magnitude slower than just pressing the respective key combo, plus requires some mindspace (what would I best type to find this?) – so it's not a complete substitute, but still extremely helpful. I'm not sure how I'd manage without. But, say, toggle comment is something I'd rather not do via the command palette, though, too slow and cumbersome, breaks my focus. It's not that great for discovering functionality, either ("autoformat" doesn't work, but might be the first search term I think of, etc.) – but it really helps with all the things I know are possible but that I use too rarely to remember a shortcut for.
I really like what IntelliJ is doing with the Mac Touchbar – that comes much closer to a substitute for memorizing (some) shortcuts for me. Cursor in a class definition, pressing shift gives me "Rename", "Change Signature", "Move Class", with Cmd pressed I get "Show usages", stuff that's somewhat context-sensitive and actually useful, though there's still lots of room for improvement, lots of useful functionality that isn't exposed that way, there could be more context-sensitivity, but it's a good start. It's something I miss a little when using an external keyboard or VS Code (which doesn't seem to support the touchbar yet). I have to look at the thing of course, but then it's right below the screen, so its not like staring at the keyboard while typing, and being able to "just do" these things without any memorization is nice, a little bit slower than shortcuts, but it doesn't break my focus nearly as much. No idea how one might offer something like this on devices with no touchbar, but I think they're on to something there, especially for people who spend only a small part of their time inside an IDE.