I gave helix a serious shot for a week, converting shortcuts and adapting to helix's way. In the end I couldn't find any advantage to it over my vim setup. It was not plug and play it was not configuration free, it was not noticeably faster. It was just full of negatives. Little gripes like the one you mention. Vim just seems to do everything better with fewer popups and selection flashes.
Yeah, I gave it a very fair shot. Got pretty good at it too. But I’m back to Vim too.
Things I loved: no plugins. Native LSP integration. The pickers are a lot faster and nicer than what I can get in neovim after absolutely atrocious configs.
Things I liked: w and e selects the word. I kinda got used to that and miss it in vim now.
Things I loathed: there is no clear mental model of what will get selected on a motion. Something like selecting a paragraph (V } in vim) is replaced with a (gf) which doesn’t ever do exactly what I want.
Overall, the annoyances outweighed the benefits. I wish evil-helix all the luck. I would use it but it kinda sucks on Mac rn since you have to whitelist every library used.
Personally I find helix is basically vim with selection oriented editing borrowed from kakoune, which is fine I guess. Real kakoune has another radical idea that helix doesn’t touch though, which is its thorough unix integration. If vim is vi for the Amiga, kakoune is vim for unix, bringing things full circle.