Personally I don’t watch videos on software (except for skimming tutorials) since I prefer to learn about topics with written tutorials or Reddit. Software influencers have been on the rise for the past several years, everything from grifters claiming they can help you start an SWE career, to ones that make tutorials and showcases on software.
I’m more interested in hearing about the later. I came across found this discussion: What can we learn from Neovim’s rise in popularity? : emacs, with comments claiming that Youtubers like ThePrimeagen have helped a lot with making Neovim popular. I crossposted it to r/neovim and many so far many users there said that they found Neovim through ThePrimeagen’s videos.
I don’t see the intersection set of people who use neovim and people who watch influencers would be somewhat big. It’s probably closer to an empty set. Neovim users are a subset of Vim users, which is already kinda niche to be influenced by some Youtuber.
I honestly was persuaded to start using neovim (again) because of theprimegean. I don’t like his content, but I was so tired of VS Code being so fucking slow and not part of the terminal. I used vim a lot, but with too many plugins it slows to a crawl. So when theprimegean talked about neovim, I was like great, yeah, I should try that. And then a few videos later I blocked his chanel because, yeah, it’s not great.
I don’t know who he is but it seems you were already in a searching for an alternative, he just did his part I guess. :) Corpos nowadays almost only use VS Code (and some force people to use it), free devs can use whatever they want. This popularity of Neovim is for that. It’s a fraction and very relative. The fact that VS Code sucks is for a different topic.
I wouldn’t complain about using VSCode if the team i was on primarily used it (a la Typescript). But yeah, I’m glad I am more independent… And not doing web dev.