I think Helix have gone the right way around with their priorities. They've started by making the right things built-in that most developers would need on a day-to-day basis. It's already better than configuring vim/neovim in that regard as it just works out of the box. An example is having Tree-Sitter and LSP already configured, so you get the best syntax highlighting available, and IDE-like functionality.

The customizability/hackability will come later, they're working on extension support plus other stuff, but I think for most of their users, this isn't the number 1 priority.

I guess their target users are those who just want to get up and running on a modal editor without spending too much time in Lua or trying to get plugins setup.