Agree on all counts. I didn't like finding and comparing plugins for neovim, and then wrestling with environment stuff to get them to work, and having to change a bunch of options to get nvim to work how I want. With helix, my config of things I've changed from default is very small, and there's no wrestling with plugins.

And yeah, "select then act" feels a lot smoother and more intuitive to me. If you like that and like plugins tho, check out kakuone