Ok, got some responses from him (I don't know what any of these things mean haha):

vimtex works perfectly on neovim (in fact, the main developer uses neovim) and is very well documented

texlab (the latex lsp server) also does build and forward search (although there's a small bug at the moment)

Oh, and backward search needs neovim-remote (\o/ mhinz); just use nvr --remote +"%line" "%file" as backward search command

https://github.com/lervag/vimtex/blob/5d1335d095d11f48a6744f...

(the vimtex dev uses Zathura, so that may be an alternative viewer to look into)

Thank you for the detailed answer, I really appreciate it.

It it great to know that the main developer for vimtex uses neovim.

I will try the neovim/vimtex/zathura combination used by the dev!

You gotta love HN. Threads like this just makes you smile.

Just to follow up, my attempts to get vimtex to work unfortunately were unsuccessful. However, along the way reading neovim plugin docs I started to figure out the difference between neovim and vim and was able to get things working via the following process:

sudo dnf install neovim

sudo dnf install python3-neovim

mkdir -p ~/.config/pack/foo/opt/mytex

cd ~/.config/pack/foo/opt/mytex

[download https://github.com/peterbjorgensen/sved/ftplugin]

cp ~/.vimrc ~/.config/nvim/init.vim

add the line "packadd mytex" to init.vim

add the line "alias vim='nvim'" to ~/.bashrc :)