Using visual mode in vim is often like using cat in UNIX:
unnecessary. If you’re uncharitable, it indicates a lack of
understanding about the basic philosophy of each piece of software.
UNIX tools are designed to work on files and STDIN (standard input).
Which is why piping a file through cat into a utility like grep is
pointless since grep can work on files directly.
Say you want to search for the word “dog” in a file called “my_file”.
Instead of cat my_file | grep "dog", you can just type
grep "dog" my_file.
Similarly, Vim has operators, which are designed to work on text objects. Which is why there’s rarely a need to visually select text, unless it’s a very irregular region. For most use cases, like copying a paragraph, you can just give the operator the text object directly.
For example, say you want to delete a paragraph. Rather than typing
vap (visual around paragraph) and then d (delete), you can
just type dap.
There are use cases for both “anti-patterns”. In a long pipeline, typing cat at the beginning can make it clearer to read, and selecting irregular regions or desiring visual feedback on certain operations benefits from visual mode.
But a lot of the time, there’s no reason to use them.