but how do people have the patience to deal with all of that in the beginning?

Whenever I was frustrated with a stupid undecipherable error message, I would just tweak my vim config a bit.

Within a few minutes, my rage at the error would be completely replaced with rage toward vimscript.

Then I would revert my vim config change, and return to the undecipherable error message with a fresh perspective. mainly relief that at least it’s not vimscript.

Joking aside, I really did learn vim mostly during coffee breaks or while waiting on some long running build process.