I can only speak for myself. For background, I was a very long time vim user, only lately switching to mostly VSCode with vim mode.
That said, I largely agree with most of what you are saying. I spent most of my time trying to get vim to be more like an IDE, and others do something similar to varying degrees (fuzzy open file, file trees, etc are among the most popular plugins for vim).
The reason I used vim all these years, and the reason I insist on using vim mode, is actually kind of related to something you said. Programming isn't text editing. Rather, doing anything on your computer is text editing! Me typing text into this comment box is text editing.
It's true that programming is a lot more about reading code and thinking than about writing code. That said, you're still writing code! And documentation, and many other things.
And vim, purely viewed as an alternative way of working with any text, is simply just superior. In the sense that the amount of time that passes between me thinking "I want to change this text here" to me being able to do it, is almost zero. I can instantly jump to a specific part of the code and make "surgical" edits to exactly what I want to change. This is common with all text editing, but especially programming - how often have you wanted to change the inside of certain parentheses combination nested inside a bigger paren (e.g. for an if statement or a function call?). Instead of spending any mental effort or time on executing this, this just flows automatically.
It's kind of like learning to use the shortcuts for copy and paste. Does this change something fundamentally about programming? No. Does it improve a little on taking an action you take many times a day? Yes. It "adds up" in terms of less things to think about.