If anyone believes this, they can't seriously be surprised when most people can't be bothered to learn their superior tool.
Most people's first experience with a new tool will be to launch it with the default configuration and get a feel for it. That is an abysmal experience with far too many tools, so people go back to what they were already comfortable with even if its potential is more limited.
There's some nuance here when distributions change the default config. For example, some distributions made vim act like vi by default, while others enabled a reasonable set of modern features. People can form completely different opinions of the vim experience based entirely on what distribution they happened to try it on first, and you can't exactly blame the users for that.