[riffraff]

I am still on (mac)vim but I think Neovim did at least two things right

1. it made async operations normal (Vim later did it too) which made things like lint-on-save much better

2. lua is better than vimscript which means easier plugin development. This in turn means it's more likely someone makes a plugin for neovim than for vim these days (e.g. newer completion/llm integrations exist for neovim which don't exist for vim)

I don't think "people installing 100 plugins" is a problem with neovim per se, people were installing tons of plugins before too, and "distributions" such as Janus existed before.