I don't remember "absolute" but I sure do remember "gotoxy" and it rhymes with boxy, yeah, you won't convince me otherwise.

Not my experience. Current Qwen Coder is noteworthy but still far from good. Can't compare them with current commercial offerings, it is just different leagues.

"However, I have vim muscle memory built over 25 years of use."

Me too and it took a view attempts but I'm on Helix now and don't regret it. Once you are over the most prominent discrepancies like dd and G it's an uphill battle.

Not at all surprising. There were some "unshakable truths" in typesetting that basically held up from Gutenberg until the Internet came along. Knuth (partly through his friend Zapf) is well aware of them and respected them in TeX.

It's relatively recent that we've found out some of these "universal" rules might not have been so important all along and together with technology as another factor things changed.