Switching from a bicycle to a truck. Vim is NOT an IDE. Yes a lot of people try to make it one, but Vim is not very good at it. You need a lot of additional small tools to even come close to a full-blown IDE in functionality. It's a text editor.
Sure, an IDE comes with all the tools and features right out of the box. But not everyone needs all of them. I don't see a problem with combining tools, which is really easy with Vim as it already runs in the terminal. I installed a couple plugins in Vim. But those all provide features I actually use and they barely affect performance. But more importantly I just prefer the Vim approach: start out with a minimal UI a…
I actually very much agree with you that IntelliJ's all-batteries-included bits can be distracting and frustrating at times, and it's annoying to track down and disable the stuff you don't want. The memory usage makes me cry; occasionally the OOM killer murders it on my 16GB laptop.
But IntelliJ actually does all the things I want it to, reliably, and (mostly) without fuss. vim/nvim just... doesn't. Or I haven't figured out how to get it to do it after hours of trying, which amounts to the same thing.
It makes me super sad, because a part of me rebels at having to use a giant IDE to be productive, but that's just been my experience. I too would rather put a motor and bags on my bicycle than start cutting down a truck, but I haven't found a motor and bags that fit and work right for me, after more work than is reasonable trying.