There is often an implied criticism of "if its not under active development for features, its not good" - which I don't agree with (and obviously neither do the VIM maintainers I think)

Maintenance mode is a good place to be IMO. I don't think anyone looking at a codebase with this maturity should feel "why aren't there significant new feature updates".

Wayland, ok I can see there are things which need 'bring into the modern era' but I don't think either Wayland, or XDG represents a massive about-face or fork moment. (I don't use graphically aided editors either vi or emacs, I live in terminal emulated space)

The moment of fear is when it ceases to be brought into current packaging by the distributions which re-factor it. I don't see any sign of that happening either.