I did this too, one downside though is that it's become such muscle memory for me at this point that using someone else's computer always results in my hitting caps lock instead of escape the first few times.

Yeah, that's the unfortunate downside. But it hasn't really happened to me since last March for some reason.

I’ve mapped it to ctrl for a while now and I’ll never go back either. In vim I use ctrl—[ for Esc, which I only started to do when the MBP added the Touch Bar.