> I'm excited to see how neovim is making progress with native LSP, but for years getting it working meant continuously tweaking vimscript/lua code or adopting a plugin written in TypeScript.

Lua and native LSP supports were introduced at the same time. Not getting how you would tweak Lua code to get LSPs to work before Neovim had native support.

> LSP just worked; it read what was on the $PATH and used it.

This is how Neovim loads LSPs as well. You don't need a plugin to download and manage LSPs. You can just install them externally yourself.

> not spending any time configuring LSP servers were the top problems plaguing my usage of neovim.

It's been years since it's just a few lines to enable LSPs with the config shipped in nvim-lspconfig if you don't want to override any server-specific settings. And even then its still pretty easy.

I will give you that Neovim should ship with nvim-lspconfig and just load a compatible LS if its already in the PATH. Enabling each server one wants to use is annoying. But again, it's just a few lines (and I'm pretty sure a lot of people wage war if they did either of those things because "bloat").