I feel the same way, which is why I made a layout with dedicated arrow keys! There’s really no substitute.
I can really relate to your post. Keyboardio takes some time to get used to, but I’ve found it very much worth it and I really don’t want to go back to a regular keyboard now.
One thing that’s really “key” here is to customize your layout extensively. The default layout isn’t that great and makes some very odd choices. For instance, why on earth would PgUp/PgDn be the base layer and Home/End be the modified one? I use Home/End far more often, so I swapped that pair. There are all sorts of things like this that you’ll have to customize to your particular pattern of use. You may want a layout where \, |, braces, brackets, tab, esc, and tilde are all available without modifiers (which is very possible).
If there’s anything you can do about this, like bring your keyboardio places and use it more, that might help.
I got the translucent keycaps (available on the website) and put clear labels on them so I could customize the keymap however I wanted! I really like having all my keycaps labeled and I love how it turned out.