Vi is unintuitive and annoying to me.

Totally fair, I only learned because I was forced to.

Why wouldn’t it work over telnet when it works via SSH?

Serial consoles feed back information one line at a time, so no curses interfaces. No arrow keys, just hjkl. Anything that needs to count characters and columns (like position-based cursor editors like nano) won’t work over telnet.

in my console, or rather terminal

A serial console and a terminal aren’t the same thing.

If you like micro, use micro. I don’t care.