I always set Vim to jump to the first search result in realtime because that lets me take a glance at another part of the file and then immediately jump back with Esc. So that way I didn't notice this apparently became a default setting in NeoVim. Which is still a weird thing and shouldn't happen imho.
And I always have all kinds of smart features disabled in every situation because almost nothing annoys me more in software, and as far as I can tell nothing changed with the switch.
The init.vim thing is definitely cumbersome when you just want to try it out, even though in the end it's just a symbolic link.
> I might revisit neovim the day I have enough time on my hand to figure out how to install the whole tresitter shebang.
I just did that last week, it's relatively straightforward with the guide in the vim-treesitter readme but requires the nightly build until NeoVim 0.5 releases. And if I'm not mistaken that future version will make it easier too.