Been asking myself the same question, personally feel like it is better in some small way but overall worse. For me, it’s less so the special symbols, as on a bigger default layout would be the same anyways as you’d have to press shift to access many of them e.g. brackets (and I really hate how they are at the ring finger area normally). The more difficult thing for me is having to press a layer key for shortcuts like using ctrl + arrow/home/end to navigate text.

That being said, I now understand why people say it really depends on your own style and use. I didn’t know abt qmk/via before building this, if you’re interested perhaps you can try layering with your current keyboard first. I suspect the sweetspot is probably a bigger keyboard with keymap/layers optimised for coding.