Is neovim really flexible enough to compete with emacs? Adding just more tooling is not really what would make it shine in emacs-space. My impression is more that neovim is competing with the likes of Sublime Text, maybe to some degree with VS Code.

Is Neovim flexible enough that it could stop being vim? Remove the modal key-system and implement something of your own? Has enough introspektion to allow something like emacs which-keys? This is a module which show a list of valid keys that can be pressed when you are inside a keychain.