mostly because you can spend an arbitrary amount of time tweaking your vim to get it the way you want it. This Vim distros, like SpaceVim and AstroNvim, are a great foundation working on an IDE-like vim setup.

For example, in AstroNvim - the path completion dropdown shows icons and all paths accessible, when focusing on a file, it shows the head of the file. It's a really smart UX integration. It would likely have taken me weeks to months of playing with my config to have a small subset of what is available in the distro.

They're also very configurable, so you can override any key-binding you want, add or disable plugins.

I guess it depends on how you want to spend your time :shrug

I used LunarVim, switched about 6 months ago because I was tired of maintaining my virc settings that I'd been carrying around for decades and a bunch of plugins.

SpaceVim has a really slick install and gives me all the LSP and a nice collection of plugins. And someone else is maintaining it!