Personally, it’s not about “reducing keystrokes”.

Modal editors shine when you’re trying edit groups of things: adjusting columns of text, applying transformations to many occurrences, etc.

Of course, non-modal IDEs let you do search-and-replace, but they don’t provide a composable framework for thinking about text transformations.

Above all else, having this composable framework enables me to focus on the code. I rarely think about my text editor. I see code, I want to change code, then I change code with a few keystrokes.