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> I'm not sure admins of old mainframes from the 80s would be interested in getting latest vim running on their hosts!

I doubt many 1980s mainframes were ever capable of running vim. People on 80s mainframes generally used mainframe text editors such as ISPF Edit (on MVS) or XEDIT (on VM/CMS)

Vim’s makefile does have support in it for compiling on Amdahl UTS, Amdahl’s Unix port for IBM-compatible mainframes, and so possibly vim could have run on an 80s mainframe running UTS. However, I’m sceptical there are any mainframes left running UTS anywhere on this planet-nobody uses it in production any more (apparently the last production users were some US telcos in the first decade of this century). I doubt any of the small number of still-working 80s/90s IBM(-compatible) mainframe systems in hobbyist or museum hands run it. There is a version available online you can run in an emulator, but it is an ancient version from the 1970s, whereas I believe the vim port is to a newer 1990s version-and I don’t believe any of those newer UTS versions are publicly available-either they survive in some private collection, or they’ve already been lost to the sands of time.

I mean, sure. But like, vim never merged with vi, either -- to this day, you can find old things that are still running pre-vim versions of vi. It's just that over time, more and more things switched their default version of vi to vim, just as over time, more and more things will switch their default version of vim to neovim.

vi != vim