I have to agree with this. Having one set of keybindings that you can take with you to most editors is something that really adds to the value of learning vim. I learned Sublime Text's shortcuts, then IntelliJ's shortcuts, which required a separate retraining. Learning vim required retraining again, but now I can bring that effort with me to new editing environments.
On the other hand, not knowing this might be like the 2-4-6 problem, where people just never thought to test this assumption. It would be entirely possible for a programming language to limit you to "i" (although nested loops would get weird). I wouldn't call this a lack of conceptual knowledge, as much as one thing they haven't tried. Having bad naming like this is bad [style](http://paulgraham.com/taste.html) , in my opinion, but doesn't mean that whoever doing it must be a bad programmer.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tMhEv28KJYWsu6Wdo/kensh?commentId=wgb3wu6kQYdCpoehL This reply to Kensho seems to be what you're talking about.
Something worth considering is the rise of high-granularity metrics. Marketing used to be about making powerful advertising that people thought helped make sales. Now, we can measure each individual campaign's effectiveness. Same with website design, which used to be about usability but is now about maximizing clicks/eyeball.
Our best measures of individual success used to be based on gut feelings, which a culture determines far more than clicks. And institutions run on cultures which encourage the type of behavior that helps the institution would win Darwinian contests against those which encouraged selfishness. But now, everyone is optimizing for individual success, and things they can measure, which tend to be short-term.
For people who are newer to vim, I think that reviewing lists like this is useful, but the main thing to realize is that there's always a clever, easy way of doing things in vim. If you're having some text-editing problem, and having to do lots of repetitive work, there will be a way of reducing that using vim. Then, when you have a problem and you are interested in sharpening your saw for a bit and you have the necessary free time, you can look up the clever way to do things.
Looking at VimGolf (https://www.vimgolf.com/) can also help make a link in your mind between useful shortcuts (like the ones listed in this post) and problems that can be solved easily with those shortcuts. For me at least, that makes it easier to recall the shortcuts when they would be useful.