That works really well for beginners to get started, but after you really understand and use Regex, the rest is just learned from discussions among colleagues and only remembering what seems useful.

There's a grammar to vim and it's easy once you are able to distinguish between the verb and adjective of the same character in vim

Vim extension in VS Code is terrible. It is a mere imitation that breaks itself and locks up over time.

Install neovim and use the neovim extension so that you get real vim and vim configs while VS Code handles the rest inside insert mode.