> vim's "killer feature" is its text editing language and modality. But plenty of other editors and IDEs offer vim emulation to varying degrees of success. So this can't be the reason to use (neo)vim-the-binary as my editor over, e.g., VSCode.

"varying degrees of success" is rather short of "sufficiently to not cause problems"; in my experience they're only good enough to get into the uncanny valley of "will this work" hesitation before every keystroke outside the most common.