Bram Moolenaar updated Vim periodically for decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)#Versions

The complaint, including from the Neovim founder, was that Moolenar rejected their update.

Ah! That's the full story, interesting. The rejected update was making plugins asynchronous.

Now that he's no longer with us, I don't think comments like this are necessary.

Being dead has no impact on the truth, actually.

And that’s not true! He did want to keep the editor stable and available for many platforms and compatible with vi. Rejected proposals break one of these rules.

True, but the point could have been made in a more tactful way, and it didn't add anything useful to the discussion anyway.

I just learned that he passed from Wikipedia.

I remember he used to get a lot of flak on HN for not wanting to update vim, back in the days.

Well, it works really well, most of us don't need any fancy new features, and we certainly don't want anything breaking.

True. But I like Kakoune more, conceptually.