Starter kits for vim/emacs IMO are a band-aid on the fundamental problem with them - poor default settings for the majority of use cases. I do think that an editor that takes the out the box experience is sorely needed in the cli editor space that helix fills quite nicely.

The big problems with starter kits is they are more fiddly to install - often require you to curl | bash some random script. They tend to mess around with your users config files in ways that you don't always expect. And they require you to keep up to date a large amount of plugins that sometimes end up breaking for various reasons. All of this adds some friction to new users.

Yes less friction than creating the configs and fetching the plugins yourself as you need to in vim/emacs. But helix remove all that fiction by just including all people expect from a modern editor from the start.

So I think it does a disservice to discount it completely just because starter kits can do a similar thing after you manage to get them installed.

but that’ll crawl to a halt as more packages depend on behavior you want to change.

I am not sure what you mean by this?

Vim/Emacs/… starter kits achieve the same experience.

Which Vim/Emacs/... starter kit sets up the same keyboard navigation model as Helix uses? I think that it's its main strength, the selection -> action approach, which is quite intuitive (at least for me once I've tried) is what really matters in Helix. The rest is just an addition, the one that makes it a quite competent and convenient environment to work with, but an addition.