Pretty cool but ... why not use a GUI? It would make it 100 times easier to use. He even says at one point "this is all just in the terminal by the way" like that's a good thing!
I am in favor of it being terminal-based, but imho you're giving all the wrong reasons.
If working on a remote machine were really an issue, you'd just mount the remote filesystem or something. That's a small convenience but not a real reason.
That you're already coding in a terminal, didn't disable alt-tab.
Spreadsheets (or to use the brand name, Excel) have a very different focus. You speak as if spreadsheets are just as good as, in this case, Visidata, but the whole point is that this is better. Else, why bother developing and using it? You can indeed just open up your favorite spreadsheet processor.
I think the real reason is that it's universal and convenient. You can use the multitasking features of your favorite shell, and it attracts a certain audience which indeed wants vim-style hotkeys and shortcuts. It also doesn't need a platform to create GUIs on top of, like Electron.
There's room for both reasons. Sometimes when you're working with massive sets of tabular data you don't want to be doing it over a network mounted drive.
What they showed in the lightning demo is so much better done with fast keystrokes than moving a mouse around. I can't wait to try this tool, it will save me days of time per year.