Even today, it's often the smallest common denominator in large scale hardened enterprise environments. Absolutely zero chance of getting vscode or anything outside of the bare RHEL/SUSE packages running for mere convenience reasons on the servers. So we are forced to learn vim and bash scripting on the fly whenever the higher level tools ( config management, CI/CD) fail that - in theory - make direct access completely unnecessary. But that's not a good reason, it's more an indication for a badly managed project/environment.

And no, I'm not an oldie, so I grew up with IDEs being ubiquitous and versatile.

Advantages of being forced on bare vim/emacs are slim. It's cumbersome, it's hard to teach newcomers, syntax highlighting rarely works, etc. Overall efficiency and productivity is very low in environments where people are forced to use them. But yes, as is true with any other tool, the wizards of old can cast amazing shortcut spells and be highly productive. But it's very tedious and time consuming to learn, and there's little point in wasting time on it when modern tools are much more accessible and equally flexible.