Just checked the script and indeed, compared to the youtube video of 10 months ago, the kickstart script now uses 'lazy' instead of 'packer' as a package manager.
LazyVim the distro is different from lazy.nvim the package manager. Both are written by folke and are excellent. Not sure why parent comment says these are extra layers of complexity. LazyVim is written in a way you can selectively disable or enable the plug-ins it uses. I can't imagine why 80% of these plug-ins would ever make their way into neovim core.
I say they are complexity because first there are a lot of ways to configure nvim by using any of the distros and starting kits and then they are slightly incompatible and use different versions of package managers, fuzzy finders, autocompleters etc. I agree most need not be in core, but it would be better to have fewer plugins doing more or less the same thing and having to find the ones that are less buggy and are being maintained. To be fair this was an issue with vim too, it's not nvim specific.