Passion about the tools others use can be called for if you can see they're obviously struggling to meet their goals with the tools they've chosen.

The hard part is, unlike a screwdriver where you can demonstrate, editors and "IT" in general are mental tools where the mindset is an invisible, nontransferable "handle" to the visible portion that everyone can see and use.

A previous manager was snarky about me using Emacs to write Python instead of “a proper tool”. Every time he’d pass my desk, “a real IDE could to that for you”. We finally had a conversation along the lines of “can it save me more time than you waste pestering me about meaningless stuff? Also, STFU until I miss a deadline for the first time since I’ve been here.”

I would not hire a carpenter who doesn’t believe in using hammers. Neither would I constantly bug a hired carpenter to use the hammer I think they should be using instead of the one they like.

Most of the time, I suppose. Watching someone try to write java in vim (or generally, without an IDE) gives me anxiety though, even with a language server :)

Meh, it's fine. In general, I find that vim in more productive most of the time (now I have a language server, before, wouldn't ever consider it!)

The fluid and consistent (java is only a portion of what I write at work) editing experience is mostly more valuable to me than the slightly better autocompletion.

I keep intellij installed, but it only open it if I want to do a fancy mechanical refactor, like extract an interface from an existing class. Smaller niceties like creating a local variable from an expression are only a handful of keystrokes just feel like naturally describing what I want (lexically, rather than semantically, I'll admit) in vim anyway.

That's perfectly doable. I routinely navigate / extend / debug / refactor a 600 KLOC Java codebase with nvim + ctags + ripgrep and will have the job done well before the language server has even completed digging through those 600 KLOC.