I understand where you're coming from, but as a frequent user of vim I'd much rather have the additional line of text.

Having the commands listed at the bottom by default is one thing i personally dislike about nano, because they take up space while being useless to someone knowing the commands (or at least knowing how to open the help in, which is what you can do in vim to achieve the cheat sheet). The alternative that vim uses, is to show the commands when starting the editor without opening a file.

one of my favorite things about helix is how easily you can check the keybinds for certain actions - just space-? and then you can see a list of every command available (by description) and their keybinds, if they have one

This is the only reason I have any idea how to navigate nano.

Try nvim

Really, I'd just recommend using nano then. It's installed basically anywhere you can find vim and works perfectly fine as a text editor! To use vim effectively it has a learning curve no matter what, so it's not necessarily meant for everyone.