I tried, so hard. Once you snort a line of a well-tuned IDE, it’s hard to decide “I’m going to learn these 30 extensions to replicate that experience in vim”.
Flip-side, I hate vim mode IDEs, too, because it tends to collide with native IDE functionality. So I just “dream of vim” and pull it up for certain specific tasks.
Is it really still the best IRC client in the world? I stopped IRCing 15 years ago but nobody came close back then.