[jnovek]

“We skipped that and haven't implemented any vim backend at all ... so its the vim code base with terminal UI stuff stripped out, and an interface added for us to hook into it.”

You took out the most important part!

I don’t know about other people, but I became a vim user because I found myself configuring servers and needed to know a better text editor than nano.

Vim is also my primary code editor these days but portability is still a killer feature.

[lbotos]

You are mis-interpreting what they did. They literally took vim, and built a ui around it. No re-implementation. It's Vim with a more modern frontend stack. You can go look at the libvim source and see it for yourself.

The point of this is to bring Vim into more modern workflows, not but "vim compat" but literally... vim.

Source: had some pull requests into libvim a while back to remove a lot of the various legacy compat features that don't make sense for libvim.