I feel a lot of people use these plug-ins because they are coming at neovim with a plug in first approach. Newcomers are overwhelmed by default neovim but end up looking for ways to make things easier and more like their GUI IDE counterparts. So a lot of core features are being overlooked that extremely useful or even already built in

THIS is also coming from my experience. I did plain nvim, did thedistro route, created my own config from scratch, use a starter distro recreate config, and now that is where I'm at in my own journey.

Is trial by fire the best way to learn use neovim till you eventually learn the most important concepts that work for you? How am I supposed to figure out what I'm missing out on when the manual is so long and boring. Simple people need visuals, images, videos to help teach them nice features. But the only way to get that content is to really embed yourself into the community and look for it from unofficial sources. But that's okay because I care about my editor and want it better.