[eviks]

it's indeed hard to assess what you miss if you have no personal experience as you do get accustomed to whatever the current workflow is, and in really complex/wide-ranging edits those might not even help (eg, if you have cursors outside your viewport it's not very helpful as you lose the immediate feedback that allows you to catch the errors and thus be more lax with your "list of steps", you could cycle around, but then this might not be better than cycling and reapplying your macro)

But then for less wide-ranging edits it's invaluable, and also helps in vim-golfing :) vs. having to record a macro and jump around to repeat it

Good point re. gv, didn't mean "permanently lost", but rather lost=deselected (and not requiring a restore selection step).

For example, even entering insert mode, adding a symbol, and going back to normal, retains the selection. Or entering "extend selection" mode in Helix (which is like vim's Visual mode) and exiting it also retains the selection until you move your cursor with a selection-changing operation.