Now that 'Escape' is not a real hardware key in the new Macbook Pro anymore and even otherwise 'Escape' has always been one of the hard to reach keys, what is workaround for avoiding the 'Escape' key in Vim?

some people use Shift Lock (which is barely used, and closer to pinky), and a colleague of mine use the sequence 'ii'

Did you mean Caps Lock? Which tool do you use? I found https://github.com/susam/uncap but it does not have a MacOS binary.