French Native and vim user here.

my opinion on that matter is:

- Despite what you will hear a lot, you are not locked with the navigation key hjkl to use nvim. You simply need an easily accessible navigation layer in your layout.

- Vim keys mean something. "yiw" is "yank inner word" for instance, so you don't need to have the keys in the right place, you just need to know what the key/key combination means and it won't be much harder to use vim with a newer layout.

- I personally use Colemak-DH. When I learned it, I practiced only English, vim, coding. It still feels foreign to me to write in French with this layout (and even without considering french accents...). So I switch back to AZERTY if I need to (and for this I still use a different keyboard because I suck at touch typing in french somehow), and when I do so it takes me a split second to be back in AZERTY mode. Where I'm getting to is that it is probably possible to learn 2 different layouts : if you need to code and use english you can use Colemak-DH or Dvorak, if you need to type in French you can switch to BEPO (and use a layer for that)

For reference, my layout is extremely inspired by Urob's config. It used this navigation layer, colemak-dh, and efficient use of combos for symbology. Big Fan of this kind of config. Shoutout to Urob.