This is the terminal that was used by the creator of vi, Bill Joy.

It should be obvious on why those keys were used. They weren’t “mapped” they literally were the arrow keys. It’s hard to change defaults. Anyone who knows vi keybinding and install work on vim or any other system.

It would be easy for you to change your own keybindings. Why is there a need to change everyone’s default and break existing muscle memory.

https://vintagecomputer.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/LSI-ADM3A-full-keyboard.jpg

I don't really think it's much of a problem that h isn't on a touch typing key because you don't need to press h very often. I probably use : way more than h. (: requiring shift isn't ideal though, although that's another can of worms)

Most Vim users use j and k more often than h and l (because there are many more ways to move horizontally), so it makes sense to leave them to the strongest fingers.

I know someone that remapped their keyboard to have ;hjkl instead of hjkl; (this is a split keyboard running qmk). This way they could keep hjkl and not remap anything inside (neo)vim.