Agreed.

I use plain vi[m] for several reasons but mainly because I used to visit customer sites all the time and have to use their environments. If I need to edit a whole bunch of files I needed to do it with what the customer has installed, and the bare minimum to rely on is plain old vi.

My .vimrc (if it even exists) contains:-

    set background=dark

That's it, and I generate that by hand whenever the syntax highlighting begins to annoy me if it isn't set. I've never used or even looked at a vim plugin.

Of course plain old vi has its limitations but I know what they are and have pretty good ways of doing anything else I need to do.