I usually use Sublime but when I'm ssh'ed to a machine I use vim, so I have some experience. I find that I need to exit insert mode to run commands about half the time, or maybe a little less than half the time, in order to run commands. Maybe thats just due to the type of thing I usually edit though. I don't have enough vim foo to know how to do this, but maybe you do: can you record a session and see how often you pressed escape? I'd be interested to know how often various people press escape.
We press escape a lot, many even map it to something more convenient like caps.
The point I was making though is that with vim you don't exit insert mode to run commands, you enter insert mode to write text and then immediately exit to normal mode.
It may sound pedantic, but it's a core part of understanding vim. Insert mode is the mode you should spend very little time in.
I suspect vim users don't notice because they instinctively press Esc as soon as they're done using insert mode, so they don't think of that as part of the next command. And I think that's fair tbh, it's just something your fingers do while you're thinking about what to do next.
