Kakoune explains its philosophy.

As a longtime god-mode user I haven't understood the hype of Kakoune but now I see what's going on. Vi, vim, Doom etc all apparently use Verb→Object order. I can see how that'd be difficult to work with. God-mode has no consistent order, it's just a palimpsestic mishmash that's been hacked on since the seventies, but it is often enough Object→Verb (what Kakoune calls "selection first"). The underlying point/mark system from Emacs helps a lot there.

http://kakoune.org/why-kakoune/why-kakoune.html