The choice of escape in Vi was because it was originally developed for a keyboar...

The choice of escape in Vi was because it was originally developed for a keyboard like this terminal.

Where escape is in a similar place to tab on PC keyboards. Also note the arrows on the home row.

Most dedicated vim users will move to using C-[ probably with caps lock mapped to Ctrl.

Other alternatives are map caps lock to escape or even have caps lock as escape when pressed and ctrl when held.