That choice was actually motivated for other reasons rather than just the modal workflow. The biggest of which was that (at the time) I found I had to really struggle to get Emacs and its ecosystem to play nicely with a highly project-centric workflow. I had used old vi regularly starting decades ago, and thus had basic usage burned in. E.g. I never understood these seemingly lame "minimal system editors" that some distros use vs. the old sysadmin standard of a minimal vi implementation (vs. full vim, emacs, etc.)

But it was becoming clear that something else was going on with modern vim, so after testing the waters a bit for my needs, I decided to go all-in as much as an ecosystem research project as anything else.