That's why GP said 'vi', not 'vim' or 'neovim'. It's an important distinction. You can still get old-school vi on most distributions, and it is far smaller and lighter than vim. In my experience, it feels snappy even if you're in an ssh session to a server in a different timezone.
At the same time, NeoVim lacks many, many of Helix' features unless you use plugins. That's fine, of course, plugins and customization are part of what makes NeoVim so great.
Anyway, can you name a few NeoVim features you miss in Helix? I still use NeoVim now and then, so I'd be happy to learn more, even if it's something small.
Granted, it's been long enough I don't even quite remember the exact issues I had, so take it with a grain of salt. It was definitely primarily weird edge cases, and might've been related to plugin use.
This is one area where NeoVim afaik comes out on top: Vimscript isn't fast, and NeoVim allows Lua plugins via the embedded LuaJit, and those should be significantly faster.
Vim feels sluggish compared to NeoVim.
NeoVim feels sluggish compared to Helix.