You’re right about Neovim’s effect on Vim improvements and lighting a fire in Bram.
Even if neovim goes belly-up (unlikely), or totally diverges (slightly less unlikely), they’ve done a huge service to the vim community simply by existing and offering compelling, thoughtful enhancements while respecting the core spirit of vim - and being exceptionally mindful of practicality in how they approach changes.
Probably one of the best-ever examples of a fork that is Doing It Right.
>are the Vim9 benchmarks not underwhelming compared to Lua or did I miss something?
Apparently that's the case, Bram did not compare against LuaJIT making the benchmarks pointless. They would quickly point out that Vimscript 2 also is, if this Reddit comment thread is to be believed: https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/ejfn57/vim9/fcxi99k/ where justinmk is one of the Neovim core devs.
As an end user, Vim feels (IMO) like a dead-end. It's cool that Bram has started trying new things but he comes off as too protective of his creation, which is fine, but then it's normal for the community to move as well.
People who more into that stuff are the Vim9 benchmarks not underwhelming compared to Lua or did I miss something?