But that seems to happen in practice with emacs and vim, why would the newly designed editors follow the same rotten path, after all they've managed to break so

But that seems to happen in practice with emacs and vim, why would the newly designed editors follow the same rotten path, after all they've managed to break some significant conventions of those other editors? The other "in practice" side is that without plugins the editor will never get as good as a properly (though painfully, though less painfully with some preconfigured distribution) configured alternative one with plugins