At the time it was a mix of wanting to check out what was so good about neovim and the things I already mentioned.
If it were now, I'd probably just stick with vim and go through the effort of finding workarounds to whatever annoyed me.
Kinda a sunk cost fallacy tbh 🫠

My two cents about the vim/nvim stuff: I use nvim because it has a few QOL improvements when using terminal buffers such as not being able to paste with `p` in vim. That irked me enough to switch to nvim, lol
As for plugins, never used them :)

so many things that this language promises that are so exciting when they should really just be the norm 😭

imagine spending a whole course learning how to use a specific API instead of learning the overall concept and what it represents