Neovim is hyperextensible
If you're barely familiar with vim/neovim, you might not know what these distributions are.
Think of NeoVim, coming with minimal features. You can add plugins, you can change keybindings, add your own customizations in it, using the config.
In the world of heavy duty IDEs and code editors full of extensions and built-in features, this makes it feel like it has nothing to offer other than being a very confusing notepad alternative.
NOTE: That being said, neovim in its bare installation is quite powerful, and I recommend one should indeed start without distributions, maybe look for
kickstart.nvimif you really want to, and discover the power of Linux's coreutils like : grep, sed, awk, sort, uniq and similar CLI tools, much more with built-in neovim features. With recent releases, they are covering a lot of groud to compete with more mainstream editors and IDEs.
Coming with a lot of baggage
Now, when I started out with neovim, I went all in, that too coming directly from using Netbeans for 2 years, then Eclipse for another 2 years, then vscode for all my college and first job - 6 years. I was well equipped with all the shortcuts vscode has to offer, all the tricks with multicursor and bunch of auto-save, auto-lint extensions, managing my custom run scripts, debug scripts, snippets.
This "baggage" of sorts, made me hate vscode, at the time, it was so slow on my relatively old machine - Intel i3 with 256 HDD and 4GB RAM. It was a nightmare to get through the large codebases and get the heavy nodejs apps to run smoothly on it. Everything took forever to load.
So when i discovered the way without bloat extensions, that can still keep me 80% capable, I was very motivated to go all in. With minimal features in editor, but faster code editing/vieweing experience.
I did miss the autocompletion features but it used to remind of the days when I used to code in VB6(Visual Basic 6), the IDE it came with, minimal code suggestion, that too was so slow, on those older duel-core systems. I was better of typing and remembering all the syntax and functions names, or anyways would have to look into the docs.
I miss the smart features
But modern programming ecosystem has changed a lot. Especially, when working on the "latest" frameworks, like angular, vite you miss the LSP integrations for autocompletion, go-to function definition, renaming and refactoring code. Tools like prettier, various linters, git integration, etc. are some of the must haves, then if you're doing work on frontend, extension to show Hex code color, color picker in editor, css helpers are quite useful.
Then more recently, dealing with all the LLM integrations, co-pilot, claude for chatting with code, asking for modifications etc, became need of the hour.
All this pushed my config from small 50-100 lines, a big mess of conflicting plugins and configs for each of them, all to get to some sane default behaviour, that just works without breaking.
The most irritating part was updating them plugins and config, without investing 1-2 hour every few months, which was quite fun for a few months, while I was learning all about LSPs, how these tools integrate, how to customize telescope to my liking, doing markdown tricks, making quite specific keybindings like this one for alternating between angular component's .ts and .html files.
Hyperextension is a headache sometimes
But, after a year or so from the switch to neovim, I was feeling quite done with all this and I decided to try out the "distributions", i.e. just a bunch of sane config, pre-bundled, and they give a specific way of doing things, which is some overhead, but quite honestly not that much work.
This is not the ideal way for me, because I love to spend hours tinkering with my setup, the editor, its new and old features. But, for now I've other priorities, and I feel quite happy with my current setup for last 2 years. I've been using AstroNvim, and on top of it, I've all my customizations and plugins. I don't share my dotfiles as I see no point, internet is quite full of much more awesome ones.
However, I might share some parts of it in my blogs, the ones that feel worthy enough for someone to use :)