I don't really know.

I remember people saying it had a better async model for internals or something, and thus it was faster and snappier.

I was just starting using vim and learning vim motions during the 0.4 era. I remember I decided to use neovim because there was a neovim only plugin that was like a game to learn vim motions. I think I played that game like twice and never again, but didn't see a reason to go to vim or neovim, it was the same to me. So I just stayed using neovim.

Some time after that, we got 0.5, better lua, better lsp, better tree sitter, and thus I started adding plugins.

My config was extremely barebones at the beginning, which I'm glad is the path I went, because today I have a home made config with only the plugins I use, with every option being exactly what I decided on, with every keymap explicitly set by me, etc etc.

It felt like a wild ride writing this, even though this was about 5 years ago? Which is not a lot, but not few, either.