Not sure if it will help you at all, but I use both Kakoune and Emacs with default keybindings (without Evil) every day, swapping between different editors for different tasks. It is something like changing keyboard layout from qwerty to emacsy because of really awkward shortcuts of Emacs. I mean that usual hjkl becomes Ctrl+bnpf. And bpnf are not close to each other in terms of location on the qwerty keyboard.
What I’m trying to say is that location of keys doesn’t really matter as long as you can type with comfort. In terms of entering commands (movement too) it is just a matter of habit.