This whole debacle reeks of stupidity. The only thing that will happen is that the criminals they are (allegedly) trying to catch will simply move their comms to different channels. What's stopping a sophisticated crime syndicate form simply creating their own app which will have a small enough footprint such that it will fly under the radar?
From the perspective of tech companies, they are being put between a rock and a hard place by simultaneously being asked for more privacy, and also less privacy.
I know the feeling. I flirted with vim and later neovim for a few years on-off, but kept going back to vscode because i wasn't as fast in vim. I did stick with the vim keybinds in VSC though and, over time, each foray into vim lasted longer until the time came where I finally stuck with it.
I'd recommend using one of the pre-baked configs (LunarVim, Astro, NvChad) to get a taste for what a batteries included vim build feels like. If you're like me you'll use it for a while, tinker with the configs etc. until you reach a point where something annoys you and you'll build a config from scratch. Seeing a fully completed config and playing with it has been really useful!
Was it worth it? Hard to say, but I'm now at the point where all the vim stuff is muscle memory, and I'm now getting comfortable with macros etc. You reach a point where rather than thinking of editing code as an interaction with an interface you start to think of it as just editing code. It's a difficult concept to get across but the fact i rarely interact with a mouse has definitely led me to become less easily distracted while coding.
My custom config feels like what I imagine having a model railway would feel like. It takes a bit of maintenance and tinkering, but it does exactly what i want it to and I get a sense of satisfaction from keeping it up to date.
It's not a matter of national expenditure, but that of personal expenditure of those pulling the strings. It's just being framed that way by the "will of the people"/"take back control" brigade, and people are dumb enough to listen.
From the perspective of tech companies, they are being put between a rock and a hard place by simultaneously being asked for more privacy, and also less privacy.