> What I mean by that is that generally they need to persuade distros to be anointed the "official" tool, i.e. Debian or Fedora would have to select Neovim as the new default text instead of Vim.

You're probably right. However, I think it's more likely that the Linux distros drop Vim entirely and make Nano the default editor than that they replace Vim with Neovim.

The BSDs have nvi as the default editor, IIRC, so they won't need to change anything.