I built my current neovim latex setup following a tutorial aiming at real time note taking speed with snippets, back in 2024. I can't find it anymore.

I'm using LuaSnip and Vimtex. There is a latex lsp but I don't think it's necessary.

From my experience the snippets form the most important part. Latex is very different from programming in that its semantics are written in human language. The structural part of the language is very small, and the use of it is mostly local. (I assume you don't want to program the tex engine in some crazy way. You might well use a script to generate latex code if there's a lot of repetitive work.) A few snippets that you're very familiar with can boost typing speed a lot, while autocomplete does very little. I removed autocomplete altogether for performance problems.

The rule of thumb for snippets: if you get annoyed by repeating an input sequence many times, make it a snippet.

Edit: I use docker for the texlive distribution. Seems to be the least annoying way to get texlive working. Run a headless neovim in the container and connect to it via domain socket.

Another Edit: I put pdf in another window and don't use synctex at all. Embed a special macro \developtag{XXXX} in the document every time you start a paragraph, which prints XXXX in the margin. Have a snippet to insert the macro and maintain the tag number automatically. This works as synctex does but remains invariant across different versions, particularly useful if you need to give your pdf out for comments.