There's some cool things to note about Xi which make me more excited about it:
* It's being written by Raph Levien, known for his work on Inconsolata, Ghostscript, and font-rs[1] among other things.
* The design goals include incredibly high performance, beauty, reliability and developer friendliness[2].
* It's very fast at handling large files, though the editor is still missing a lot of functionality.
Raph was also interviewed on the New Rustacean podcast[3] and talks a fair bit about Xi.
I don’t see how this would be better than just Neovim with a few plugins. I switched from Vim to Neovim and love it. Highly configurable and rock solid for everything I have asked it to do. Although I miss things like a live Markdown editor with preview like what you see in VS Code, but that is a small price to pay for ultimate control over your editor.
I've just recently switched over to it for my day to day work. Admittedly there are rough edges, but I think it's fair to call it viable for sufficiently small values of viable. I expect to do a major push later in the year to polish it to the point of being really viable.