@redstarfish neovim originally was an attempt to clean the vim codebase by _removing_ the features from the core to enable more powerful plugins, so, in way, yes and now: emacs way is to empower the editor via the plugins, vim (~unixy) way is to offload extra functionality to separate programs. Neovim was the first to introduce the plugins that execute in separate threads (before vim8), emacs is still single-threaded as far as I know.