To be fair, I'll often do that as well, but just looking at the keys misses that there's a pause between the d<motion> and the i. I don't like sitting in insert mode, so if I don't know what I'm going to replace a thing with, I'd rather delete it, then insert something else after I've figured it out.
Comments
Judging from his discussion of cib in the Data Acquisition section, it seems like he's familiar with it.
Perhaps familiar, but not ingrained in his muscle memory to used instead of d<motion>i.
To be fair, I'll often do that as well, but just looking at the keys misses that there's a pause between the d<motion> and the i. I don't like sitting in insert mode, so if I don't know what I'm going to replace a thing with, I'd rather delete it, then insert something else after I've figured it out.