I do get that the Vim editing model is hard, but that professional developers refuse using a tool because you have to change some defaults and customize it a little is too much.
It's really not that hard or time consuming to setup, for more gains than many of the courses or experiences people have put themselves through.
And it's not like it's a "vscode vs Vim" thing, I see the same argument inside the Vim community too where people refuse plugins because it's too much work, or even switch to Vim-like editors that don't have a plugin system as if it was a positive thing.
What gives? I'm sure it's not as easy as everyone just being lazy.
Maybe it's the perseption that it's hard and time consuming that's the problem?
Second, it's not fast and easy even with LazyVim, let's start with the basics like keymap:
map({ "n", "x" }, "j", "v:count == 0 ? 'gj' : 'j'", { expr = true, silent = true })
map("n", "<C-h>", "<C-w>h", { desc = "Go to left window", remap = true })
To understand this (and to adjust to your liking) you kind of have to learn the language you're not going to use ('gj' or <C-w>h) instead of using something easily readable like ["go","window","left"], or instead of actually pressing C-w to insert <C-w> like many (mostly GUI) apps allow
Then the time consuming part: it doesn't make it easy to resolve conlficts which inevitably arise when doing many rebinds. Also, it'd be very time consuming to learn and reference that unused binding language
Then the help is rather verbose and not intuitive (see my parent comment) (don't remember if help uses default keybinds or actual ones
Then it relies on a very barebones and not very popular language (though miles better than vimscript)
Then there are a gazillion of other things which make the perception reflect the reality pretty well
Enthusiasts are familiar with a lot more, know the domain, and so are able to navigate the intricacies. -- There's an xkcd comic which points out that you're probably under-estimating what it takes to be familiar with this stuff. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam... -- And while it's nice to be enthusiastic about stuff, not everyone's going to have full enthusiasm for everything they do.
In terms of accessibility:
Having "bad defaults out of the box" just doesn't make sense compared to "having good defaults out of the box". If it's very unusual, or unintuitive to use, that's just added friction to get someone to learn. (And if fewer people adopting a tool leads to a smaller community).
There's plenty of stuff which isn't so hard if you know where to look.. whereas, without knowing where to look, it's confusing to navigate.
There's a communal cost to having fragmented/bespoke setups; if everyone's using pretty much the same thing, then anyone can help anyone out. -- Someone familiar with the intricacies will be able to understand the differences, but a novice might not know which bespoke thing would be best to copy.
The xkcd hits home hard.
I know that sounds complex but if you're coding (which I assume many neovim users are) should be fairly straightforward