The normal pattern, in Unix-like systems at least, is to just write to a non-existent file. There is very little reason to create an empty file first.

In Emacs I can even open a file in a non-existent directory and it will create all the containing directories when I try to save. So I rarely even use mkdir.

I've always just used `:e <filename>` - never saw the appeal of oil.nvim for that use case. But for other kinds of modifications it's nifty.