Which is arguable an attack vector. Depending on how careless the user is, there is far more likely a chance that malicious code is found in .vimrc than is found in the VIM executable.
They’re probably referring to the attack surfaces of the extensions you have loaded in your normal configuration, as opposed to the probably empty environment of root.
I actually would prefer the editor binary to run as root, rather than have my VIM config available. Any malware that could replace my system VIM would already have access to do whatever it wants to anyway. But malware to alter my own VIM configuration has a much lower barrier to entry.
