I don't uninstall it but I don't really get the love, mostly because of the keybindings. Maybe I'm too young and don't know its legacy but they seem super esoteric to me and I've never seen them anywhere else. Emacs navigation bindings are similar to terminal bindings, and well vi is its own world but at least fairly widespread today.
nano is a GPL-licensed clone of pico, which in turn was originally conceived as the integrated message editor in PINE, the popular UNIX e-mail client first released in 1989. If you look at the overall interface of PINE you will recognize that it is consistent with pico/nano, but other than that there really wasn't much consistency in terms of keyboard commands between apps in 1989.
More importantly, while for instance ^S for "save" might seem more natural than ^O for "writeOut", remember that dumb terminals over slow lines were still very much a thing in 1989 and ^S was already used as a terminal control code for XOFF (software flow control) -- which is why nano throws that "XOFF ignored, mumble mumble" message when it catches ^S.
