> The sheer disdain in that sentence alone.
I'm sorry that you read it this way, I think I could have written it differently. That being said, I don't agree that any of the things you listed are tools.
Moreover, reading what you wrote in your original comment from a more negative stance, I also think it's easy to read it as disdainful but I chose not to read it that way. I would appreciate it if you were more positive in your reading of what I write.
Tools in my mind are things like: a keyboard, your IDE/editor, your build system, your VCS, your userspace utilities (sed, awk, cat, ls, grep, etc), code formatters, code linters. I guess "tool" is probably not the best name for these categories given that I can understand why you would also call a library a tool but to bring in an analogy from woodworking, tools are things you use to make things from the materials (what would be libraries, frameworks, programming languages, etc).
So having this distinction in mind, I don't think it's necessarily incorrect to state that you are of the opinion that what I would categorise as "tools" are not worth learning and (I should add) modifying.
Again, I would like to stress, I am not trying to make any objective claims as to how correct your approach is. I am simply observing that there seem to be broadly two categories of programmers. Those who feel like investing time in learning and writing/modifying "tooling" is worthwhile and those who do not. I feel like you fall into the latter category.
In this sense, I don't think vim, neovim, or emacs are really appropriate for people who don't feel like time spent learning and writing or modifying (let's call them) peripheral tools is worthwhile. Whereas you feel constrained by the need to understand what to you might feel are "irrelevant details" (the need to know the API) about neovim, I feel constrained by what you might feel are "irrelevant details" (the need to adjust to a specific workflow which I might not be used to, the need to constrain myself to a specific set of plugins) about VScode.
That being said, I will say again, to claim that vim takes a lot of time to use and configure is simply wrong. But if you feel like having to learn an API to use an editor is a waste of time then it would explain why your experience might be like this. It's not possible to use vim quickly without having learned the API. Likewise, I feel like having to adjust to a specific way of editing as envisioned by a specific company and a specific plugin writer is a waste of my time and it would explain why my experience of VScode is that it takes a lot of time to configure and use whereas your experience is different. This doesn't mean that VScode takes a lot of time to use and configure, just that it's fundamentally not for me.
I hope the above clarifies things. I would be happy to agree on a different term than "tool" or a clearer way to distinguish between e.g. an IDE and a library or framework.