All they had to do was pick a different file name

True. But it’s not like they planned some vengeance against the VIM backup file.

People are making it sound like this is a huge company with a product and not a grouping of curious people with a couple hours of free time on a Sunday.

Most likely they never thought about it, then it broke, then it was not impactful enough to fix on their free time compared to other stuff.

	▲	jeremyjh 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They knew about it in advance. They decided people shouldn't care about that data. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/13973#issuecomment-789...
	▲	roryirvine 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But they hold themselves out as being a normal software project, suitable for use by casual users. They even talk about having a "stable release" and advertise various sponsors. If it's really just a toy with no expectation of not unexpectedly destroying user data then they ought to make that more clear.