I think it's more of a lucky accident. There really is something to be said for hjkl scrolling. I enable it in as many apps as I can because I find it genuinely more comfortable than arrow keys. And that's not because I'm some unreformed grognard, I was introduced to vim only a few years ago.
I just have trouble buying it. Competitive gamers earn their living navigating directionally using a keyboard. If placing the navigation keys in a line on the home row were really so much better they would all be doing it by now.
Competitive gamers aren't constantly switching between navigation mode and typing mode, and they use only a small fraction of all the keys on the keyboard.
Also, if their experience is supposed to be indicative, HJKL should be replaced by WASD which is apparently much more efficient.
That’s more historical than anything. Especially because the S key is usually not used in WASD: instead of walking backwards, a combination of mouse+A/D is used. If you look around you’ll see some pros use ASD with S replacing W. In MMO PVP where more keys are necessary for abilities, SDF and ESDF are also a thing.
Do you really scroll using the keyboard? I always use the trackpack, which is just between my hands as I type, and I find it incredibly slow to use the keyboard for navigation unless it's just a few lines up/down... with the trackpad, without moving my hands more than a few centimeters, I can go anywhere in a file instantly.
