I had to SSH into a server for dev work at a previous job. And vim was the obvious best answer for "IDE like" experience in a terminal. I needed more power than nano.

And then vim stalled in development. Neovim was created in response to that, and it had new shiny features (many of which vim also has now), that caught my eye (async tasks were added to neovim before vim).

So I was a vim user out of necessity and I switched to neovim to chase new shiny things, and have found 0 reason to go back.