I thought the appeal of vi was it can mostly be used "as is" vs emacs being infinitely customizable? The folks I know who use vi do so because they are at their core, sysadmins, and something simple and consistent is valued.
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Vim and Neovim are pretty close to being infinitely customizable, but vi is a different story. Likewise, Emacs can be used as is. If anything, the difference was in the core audience. A sysadmin is more hesitant about customizing their tools because they tend to deal with many different systems. It's also the main reason why they use vi (Vim and Neovim are simply substitutes), because it is always available. Emacs tended to attract people who customized their tools.
These days, things are a bit different. Vim and Neovim are more easily customized, and have gained a following because it is more finger friendly (even if it is harder to learn).
Interesting. Are vim on the CLI and Vim the gui program two separate things? (I actually used "MacVim" on MacOS for basic note taking in class since I could alt tab to it, but tended to do any script writing in vim on the cli.)
Anyways, my only customizations are usually to turn on line numbers and syntax highlighting... I also have sublime, but sometimes I find writing a script it can be helpful to just use a very simple editor, write out some psudocode with comments, then slowly build it out... it's easy to get distracted in a full blown IDE. (And I'd argue emacs or vim when heavily customized effectively become an IDE)
I hardly ever use gvim. From my understanding, there are a few relatively minor GUI specific settings for the GUI version. Contrast that to emacs. It's possible to present documents with multiple fonts and images in the graphical version. (The irony: vim and gvim are separate binaries, which emacs can have a unified CLI/GUI binary.)
I agree that heavily customized, emacs and vim can be an IDE and that it can be distracting. It is possible to pick and choose the desirable (e.g. non-distracting) elements of an IDE when configuring either editor, but that in itself turns into a distraction.