I think this is mostly an issue of tooling! I admit I often find myself recompiling a full file because SBCL is just so goddamn quick it doesn't make a difference, so perhaps I'm missing something essential. But with tree sitter you could totally write a plugin to, say, run the literal content of a python expression in the REPL. It's just shuffling text around after all. The fact that people haven't done this may indicate, and I stress may, that this is not something that people are missing.
I personally can't use anything without vim bindings. I have evil mode in Emacs, vimium while I'm in Firefox, vim bindings in Nyxt, and an aversion to using any program that isn't one of the above. This is not just hipsterism- on 10 occasions while writing this comment I've had to delete a kj or jk as I tried to exit edit mode. That doesn't really mean non-vim bindings are defective, if you catch my drift. No judgement here! But it's a possibility you might consider.
I personally can't use anything without vim bindings. I have evil mode in Emacs, vimium while I'm in Firefox, vim bindings in Nyxt, and an aversion to using any program that isn't one of the above. This is not just hipsterism- on 10 occasions while writing this comment I've had to delete a kj or jk as I tried to exit edit mode. That doesn't really mean non-vim bindings are defective, if you catch my drift. No judgement here! But it's a possibility you might consider.