You joke, but a colleague tried to get me using nvim a few months ago, and after installing all the stuff he recommended, my first impression was that I was running emacs. It was busy, there were extra buffers all over the place, things kept popping up as I typed, and I wasn’t clear on how to get to normal mode. In sure this has as much to do with his config, which I copied without understanding it, as it does with nvim itself, but it felt very unfamiliar.

> and I wasn’t clear on how to get to normal mode.

You need to ditch your heretical friend if he has broken the Holy Commandment of <Esc> to get to Normal mode.