Because when I started using Vim, VSCode and Helix weren't around. And now I know Vim (Neovim) very well and it does everything I need - I'm productive with it and it's lightweight.

I don't want a full IDE/graphical editor. Eclipse is a mess, I'd use a JetBrains product first, but now we have VSCode as an alternative. Atom was hot for a while but has lost popularity.

Of the (linux) terminal text editors, the choices were mostly:

* Emacs * Vim/Neovim * Nano

And I prefer Vim over Emacs, I really like the modal experience.

I don't spend a huge amount of time tweaking things, I use Neovim mostly stock with some useful plugins for convenient shortcuts. Though I admit that getting the new treesitter/language server integrations working was annoying, compared to the original regex-based syntax highlighting.

My goal is not to recreate an IDE experience in Neovim, I just want an efficient text editor that is syntax-aware.

If I wanted an IDE then I'd use an actual IDE.