One decade? How long can this go on? Two decades? Three? If one is in the middle of their professional career before they've mastered all the "vim skills" (or even more so, the more numerous) Emacs skills, then they'll never gonna master them all in time to matter anyway.

And the point of internal vs third party is not if internal are numerous enough, but if they're productive, convenient enough. Internally vim has tons of features, but it doesn't have a linter, for example.

In any case, things one still discovers "a decade in" are not really an argument for not setting up a good main driver vim environment with more than built-in conveniences. Those wont prevent you from learning vim built ins, and you could get immediate access to features, and in a more convenient form, that could take you a decade to chance upon as built-ins.