One of the neovim devs released a video just a couple of days ago on the topic.
He suggests neovim (and vim, emacs etc) fall into a category between text editor and IDE.
The term he uses is PDE (personalised development environment). In short, you have lots of power to customise your setup; you can give it some IDE-like behaviour but the way you do it tends to be by making personal choices of plugins and config.
It's not just a text editor, it's definitely not 'integrated'. I'm inclined to agree with him.
Yep, "neovim taking the IDE route" is a bad take.
That’s why I inserted “community” in the middle of that sentence. Neither of the mentioned plugins are neovim’s own, it only enabled their existence. Not sure why Bram was against “async”, but I am highly suspicious about this part.
What it means in this context?
Creation of GUI?
Vim is basically IDE at this point, if you configure it well and install plugins.
Note that another non-goal is "Limit third-party applications (such as IDEs!) built with Neovim"
So the idea is Neovim by itself isn't an IDE. But it does enable you to build an IDE using configuration and plugins, or even embedding it in a GUI.
https://neovim.io/charter/