It isn't just the look, it really is an antiquated text editor, based on even more antiquated text editors. Though a well maintained one with a very active fork in neovim.

There are arguably better IDEs for programming and easier text editors that are still very powerful and support customisation and extensibility.

Being a reasonably small editor with a text based UI I can easily use it to edit files anywhere and on any sort of hardware with great performance and opening up a file to make a quick change is practically instant. And then being able to navigate around, edit and change different types of text objects isn't something all that common outside of the vi world I think.

It is probably most suited to people who want quick mouseless editing of text and already work in a *nix command line environment. First impressions aren't great and I am sure lots of people give up and use something else including myself. But then my needs changed and I found vim (now neovim) was a surpsiingly good fit. Like most editors it needs a few plugins installed and customised to support more complex needs and they aren't a point and click thing like vscode.

You probably don't need it. I like it because it's lightweight and always available in my terminal, and the modal paradigm of editing is very well suited to editing code. It's more like modifying the structure of the code rather than working at the character-level.

However, I've spent years finding the right set of plugins, shortcuts, and keybindings that work best for me. I've basically turned it into an IDE for myself, but one that I can navigate much more efficiently than something like Pycharm (even with vim mode).