I use OG vim mainly because I perceive it as more performant. Maybe my use isn't typical, I don't know, but when I try out nvim every other year or so I usually switch back due to it feeling a bit sluggish. Since version 8 OG vim supposedly has async support, I'm guessing that's why the ALE stuff doesn't seem to lag anymore.

Recently I've tried zed. It was very weird. Installing modules is slick and performance is decent most of the time, but it lags sometimes and doesn't play nice with i3. I'm guessing it somehow sucks in all keypresses and only hands them over to i3 when it has exhausted its own checks and stopped lagging, causing rather harsh interruptions in my workflow where I usually hop immediately from the code to browser, shell or whatever to check on we results.