Two things that helped me more than anything with "learning" vim and or ever wanting to use it:
1. Remap your "capslock" key to "escape." Vi was written using an ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard, which you can see here: https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys has the escape-key in a sane place. On modern keyboards, if you can, remap "capslock" to "escape" when pressed alone, and "ctrl" when pressed with another key.
2. Make your leader key something easy like the comma character "," E.g. to make a horizontal split, I press (not including quotation marks) ",h" or ",v" to make a vertical one.
Once I did those two things it all made so much more sense... It's also great because most editors these days support vim bindings, so even if you don't want to use vim you can still benefit from its really-awsome-once-you-figure-it-out UX.
I hear this recommendation a lot. You can do that, but much better is to get a keyboard with a proper thumb cluster like a kinesis[1], maltron[2], dactyl[3], ...
Much better to put such a common key on the thumb than stress out a pinky. I have a kinesis, and have esc mapped to the 'end' key there; similar positioning is possible on other keyboards. The keyboards I linked are also much more ergonomic than most flat keyboards—important, if you rely on your hands and wrists for your livelihood. Bit expensive, but well worth it.