Yup, Neovim is very awesome, I use it myself pretty much every day whenever I need to ssh to a remote host. There are many reasons though for why it is unlikely to dethrone Emacs as my main driver. Just like Emacs could never fully replace my photo-editing app.
It saddens me how people of Emacs often reject vim navigation outright, just as the broader programming community tends to dismiss the fundamental ideas that drive Emacs.
Neither represents a dogmatic religion, nor do they embody fundamental, conflicting truths about computing. No one needs to choose one and commit to it exclusively - they are simply tools, built upon some brilliant foundational concepts. Understanding and utilizing the ideas behind them may literally transform your life in mind-blowingly positive ways. I wish more people contemplated this profound truth, instead of thinking they have to stick with one, particular way of things.
Evil mode is fantastic. Not only am I fascinated by how nicely it works, I'm just impressed that it's never been a built-in feature of Emacs. It definitely doesn't feel that way. It feels like a baked-in, first-class thing.
Here's one thing about vim-navigation. Gary Bernhardt (the WAT talk guy) once said: "There's no vim-mode there's only Vim" and he was right - to a certain degree. All the different extensions and attempts to bring vim-navigation to non-vim editors have glaring deficiencies - all of them - VSCode doesn't fully vim, IntelliJ doesn't do it comprehensively, Sublime can't properly vim, etc. With one notable exception. Emacs actually vims better than vim/gvim/neovim. I'm saying this with the full-blown confidence of a die-hard vimmer.
The way Emacs implements Evil-mode and its extensions is the ultimate compliment to its design. If there's a model of a plane that can perform a vertical landing, yet never actually needs to use it, I would still love that model over any other planes, even if the feature is purely accidental. The fact that it can do so alone would be great evidence of amazing engineering. Evil-mode is absolutely one of the most celebrated achievements of Emacs, complementing other remarkable packages like Org, Magit and many others.
I used Vim for 5 years before I eventually made the switch to Emacs. The reason I switched was because I needed an alternative to stop my hands from hurting all the time. Because having to slam every key at full force (because a missed input can wreak absolute havoc) was really taking its toll on both my hands. The combination of using standard Emacs bindings and the Dvorak keyboard layout have improved things significantly.
I think your case is an outlier - I think most people go the opposite direction specifically to escape issues with their wrists, but I suppose it is all very personal - depends on too many factors. Great thing is that Emacs is so flexible, it doesn't really care how you use your keyboard.
Yes I used the chorded emacs default keybinds for years but only got interested in modal editing as I became more wary of hurting my wrists. Even having switched Caps Lock and Control a decade ago, I still find it harder to do C-n than just `n` in god-mode.
It saddens me how people of Emacs often reject vim navigation outright, just as the broader programming community tends to dismiss the fundamental ideas that drive Emacs.
Neither represents a dogmatic religion, nor do they embody fundamental, conflicting truths about computing. No one needs to choose one and commit to it exclusively - they are simply tools, built upon some brilliant foundational concepts. Understanding and utilizing the ideas behind them may literally transform your life in mind-blowingly positive ways. I wish more people contemplated this profound truth, instead of thinking they have to stick with one, particular way of things.