>Vim also starts up without any noticable delay

Only if you run it without any plugins. Unfortunately if you have a lot of third party packages, vim startup times start to get closer to emacs startup times (both of which are still better than any IDE I have used, of course). I keep a vim.norc alias in my alias file which launches vim with an empty .vimrc for this very reason.

Strange. I use 15 plugins and according to the --startuptime flag NeoVim takes 32ms to start. Vim takes about twice as long, but that's still so incredibly fast I'd call it instant. I guess when it comes to plugins there are some real heavy-hitters out there that I somehow managed to never try.

You could use autocmd for filetypes that require plugins, so they don’t load for configs/texts. If your pm of choice allows this separation, ofc.

I’m not very experienced with complex plugins, but most of what I’ve seen did nothing unless explicitly initiated. Maybe there are global variables to control that.

I've found that profiling startup time and lazy loading plugins could reduce your startup time to 100~200ms even if you have more than 50 plugins.