My opinion must be marginal, but in my view neovim community took an IDE route anyway so maybe it is a good thing if they separate, provided there is a way to switch. Because when you have a function in bigpkg.tgz, no incentive exists to dedicate a smaller package to it, and that changes the entire landscape dramatically and may create political issues in it. I actually liked simple little plugins vim had back in the day and not these coc/lsp/ycm things which compete in size with the editor itself, if not outright an order of magnitude larger. I tried to go neovim at least three times and it seems to be focusing on these big things, while e.g. having long standing issues in gui functionality on windows, namely gui mode (qt-nvim) resizes, window updates, file associations. With vim9 I’ll maybe finally learn to script it as I wish.
One of the neovim devs released a video just a couple of days ago on the topic.
He suggests neovim (and vim, emacs etc) fall into a category between text editor and IDE.
The term he uses is PDE (personalised development environment). In short, you have lots of power to customise your setup; you can give it some IDE-like behaviour but the way you do it tends to be by making personal choices of plugins and config.
It's not just a text editor, it's definitely not 'integrated'. I'm inclined to agree with him.
That’s why I inserted “community” in the middle of that sentence. Neither of the mentioned plugins are neovim’s own, it only enabled their existence. Not sure why Bram was against “async”, but I am highly suspicious about this part.