Honestly this article reinforces the value of neovim in my mind. I started with vi, then learned vim, then emacs, and now I am using neovim. The world of 2023 is different than the world of 1991, and neovim is an incredibly capable editor which is not forced upon anyone.

Why use vim and not vi then?

tldr: old man yells at clouds. Irrationally conservative and arrogant. OP demonstrates quite handsomely how they don't understand anything about neovim nor the history of regexp.

as someone who uses neovim because all my pure rice vim plugins run soooo much smoother on neovim, i'm going to go out on a limb and say that he is dramatically overestimating the representation of his demographic among neovim and maybe even vim users.

i think i read the phrase "emacs envy" more than once, i just feel like OP has a very specific audience for this post in mind

:shell is removed, but isn't :terminal a modern and in all ways a better replacement? You can have multiple terminals and put them in "tabs" or splits just like you do with buffers.