Esc is probably the easiest key to hit in the keyboard? Tied with bottom left ctrl/fn and whatever you have in the other two corners. As in it's the easiest to misclick without accidentally hitting other keys
The easiest are F and J, the home keys where your index fingers rest. The more you have to "reach away", the harder it is to always correctly reset your hand.
I'm not advocating for that! Just that Esc/Mode shouldn't be far. Vim uses Esc for mode switching because the author wrote vim on a keyboard that had Esc where now Capslock is on a modern keyboard.
