What do you use for i ("insert") then? Personally "hjkl", i, esc are the last keys I'd want to remap. Though I hear some people like to remap esc to caps lock or even space. But feel sacriligious to me.
I switched "i" and "h" since "h" is no longer used for navigating left in my arrangement (that is now "j" so it matches the wasd/arrow-keys arrangement).
For esc I actually use "hh" in quick succession (inoremap hh <esc>).
Yeah, it felt a little sacrilegious when I first remapped it a decade ago, but ultimately I decided that all that was important was achieving the productivity benefits of home row navigation and ijkl does it just as well as hjkl but the ijkl arrangement was already immediately intuitive to me. For me, vim is all about the cumulative benefits of plugins and little hacks like this that optimize my workflow in a way that aligns to how my brain already thinks.
The main criticism I receive for this setup is that if I ever have to ssh into a machine that I don't control, I won't have any of my custom settings and fancy plugins, but I'm ok with this since my custom vim setup is my IDE and I wouldn't expect to have my IDE available in an SSH session if it were vscode or webstorm or whatever. Also, it's possible to edit files over ssh, and worst case scenario I just temporarily switch contexts to hjkl, but in practice I don't really have to edit code over ssh.
What do you use for i ("insert") then? Personally "hjkl", i, esc are the last keys I'd want to remap. Though I hear some people like to remap esc to caps lock or even space. But feel sacriligious to me.