I personally do not have the patience for it even after giving it a try. But in my case, my 3yo laptop might just be too slow to handle all that bloat.
You can learn basic Vim commands in 30min with vimtutor. One thing to keep in mind is this: https://danielmiessler.com/study/vim/#language and this https://www.vi-improved.org/recommendations/
Now what you may see, to your point, is people pushing (one of the many versions of) Spacevim on those forums. And they are shat upon rather immediately. It does happen though. But that at least makes sense, because those programs make using vim "easier", therefore eliminating issues users may have.
But neovim? Certainly not. The only time that would be a suggestion for someone is if they want some of the features neovim has over stock vim (maybe they want saner defaults, for example, or don't like tmux and want an integrated terminal).
My point here is only to learn first and extend further. Not throw yourself into high water with SpaceVim and than say how much vim or neovim is bloated.
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Dunno is it only me but I see a weird thing going on with "new" Vim community.
Everyone is starting to use it as a VSCode or Atom, trying to use hundreds plugins but most of them don't even know how to use tabs properly... I see most of this by new "neo" fans "you don't know how to make a thing in Vim? Download Neovim... or even Spacevim configuration." type of way. :)
Don't want to start a war here because every editor has it's own fans and I do not want to offend anybody either. But every one should learn to use vanilla version of their editor of choice before moving further.