Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you find your brain can actually work that way? My issue with all of these relative jump points, repeat this N times, etc of VIM is by the time I’ve calculated in my mind what the command should be I’d have already done it with just standard navigation/mark/yank/repeat. But perhaps you have galaxy brain ;)
The way vim works is actually the opposite of what your brain wants, this is one of the reasons why learning vim tricks is hard. The vim model is "action-object" (eg dw, delete word). A more natural, friendly and interactive model is the opposite, "object-action": first you select the text, your editor highlights the text, then you apply actions to the selection, one by one, and see what happens after each one. Becau…
The description you gave of the actions one takes in editing makes sense: in most non-modal editors, you select the text you want to take actions on, then choose the action to take. But, I can do that in literally every modeless editor! That's the way essentially all of them work.
But when people write of "Vim as a text editing language" as many comments here do, the action -> object model -- again, at least for me -- fits the pattern. We say "I'm going to the store," not "store I'm going to," unless Yoda we are. And, most programming languages that aren't purely object-oriented tend to follow a rough pattern of "action(parameter)". So in editors like Sublime Text (or VSCode or BBEdit or...) I tend to do editing in an entirely visual way, Vim approaches editing in a more language-based way, and when you describe edits in language, "[verb] the [noun]" is pretty natural.