This is a weird hill to die on. As much as I resonate with many of the concerns, I don't see refusing to use AI as something that will actually help any of those things. Forking a stable version of vim is something I guess, but I don't really see the sky falling with mainline vim or neovim.

Personally the leverage I have as a bit of a cranky graybeard myself is that I understand how software works and I can distinguish between good and bad uses of AI and think critically about how to influence things towards better software. Just declaring AI as unequivocally bad and evil will do nothing more than make me irrelevant. At some point being right is useless without some measure of also being effective.