A lot of other comments make related points that kind of dance around this, but here it is: The major improvements of neovim aren't (directly) user facing. It's a major refactor, which makes it immensely easier to maintain and contribute too. Neovim isn't a vim reinvention, it's a vim renewal.

What I think is interesting here is that Neovim is entirely contrary to the original point of Vim, as presented in the article: a vi available on non-Unix systems. It was portable, so it could be run anywhere. Now Neovim's selling point is that it DOESN'T have all the code that enabled that portability.

Not suggesting one way is better or worse, but I think it's interesting.

For me the major improvement is that it puts the settings in the .config folder. I like this because I keep my settings in a git repo.

The main advantage on the other hand is that my friend stopped bothering me about having to switch to neovim, which I guess is a non-issue for most. Now he's trying to get me on to zsh.

I've kept pretty much all my settings in a git repository for years -- you don't need the program to explicitly make that easier.

    $ git clone <<repository_url>> $HOME/config
    $ ln -sf $HOME/config/vim/vimrc $HOME/.vimrc

It's not the end of vim. I highly doubt NeoVim is going to replace it at all.