Vim used to have very very conservative defaults, but it was fixed in Vim 8. Some very useful features like persistent undo are still not enabled by default.
Bear in mind that that feature is disabled for good reason, it has some serious security implications (e.g., your visited file history is potentially leaked, as well as sensitive text ending up in your .vim folder).
Security concerns in the same editor that added non-authenticated blowfish encryption in 2010?