The real strength of vim (and emacs, though I haven't learned emacs to know this firsthand) is the expressivity of it rather than the raw speed. When you can express an edit as a sequence of key presses, you can record and replay that to easily and make the "same edit" in many places.

The funniest time I did this was with a interview screening question which had a hundred-deep chain of links with the URL for the next link embedded in some JSON with some additional formatting required to get a working link. Vim let me copy a line of text that's a curl command, shell out to replace it with the ~6 lines of JSON response, edit that as a string down to a curl command to the next URL, and wrap that entire process up as a macro to run a hundred times.