Dunno, never had to do this. At most I might set PAGER=vim which means maybe something else is piping for me. If you're piping with vim then fine, but it's not a requirement to use it, unlike smaller utils that are begging to be piped.
is not a defensible argument (regardless of what you use), see the relevant comment here¹
the bigger point is to get more precise and utilitarian control over text which I already discussed here in this thread², piping in and out of your editor buffers sometimes comes very handy.
