I just use ctrl-c instead of esc. Infinitely more accessible than esc or even ctrl bracket - it mystifies me why it’s not more commonly known. Only problem is that it quits you out of macros, so you need to use esc then, but that’s easy to remember and I use ctrl-c probably 4 orders of magnitude more than I use macros. (In fact, multi cursor mode in vscode vim obsoletes them for me entirely!)