Sysadm here as well, been using vi since the '80s. A year or so ago I threw away all my custom vimrc and went with (nearly) bone stock LunarVim, and have really enjoyed getting off the treadmill of maintaining a custom vim setup. Partly because of the 100s of machines issue, partly because of managing plugins and interactions between them. I program maybe 5% of the time, so the stuff I do to make it IDE-like often isn't worth maintaining for that 5% time, so I often end up with partially working plugins or whatnot.
LunarVIM has been a bit tricky, mostly related to upgrades around LunarVIM, usually neovim updates. But, the capabilities of having Language Server in vim have been so refreshing! Particularly when working with Python 2 code to bring it up to Python 3, pretty much just follow what Language Server says.
When it gets right down to it, there are only a couple little tweaks from my old setup I want to carry over, everything else I want to go back to using defaults (places where I've diverged my own functionality) and stop pushing around a poorly maintained manual config that gives me 10% of what Lunar or similar gives.
One of the things I noticed about LunarVim is that they were not very receptive about it in the official NeoVim rooms whereas people there (including NeoVim developers) were quite positive about LazyVim. The other alternative they suggested was https://github.com/echasnovski/mini.nvim
TLDR is that with the global lvim object, custom path, breakages because of unstable plugins it causes a lot of support issues where people go to the official NeoVim channel and not the LunarVim one.
I switched to LazyVim, which is developed by folke (one of the main developers of most of the plugins (trouble.nvim, tokyonight, which-key, lazy.nvim etc) https://github.com/folke?tab=repositories) the other "vim distributions" use anyway.
I'm also very happy I only maintain now "one configuration", I really disliked having "nvim" and "lvim" simultaneously on the same machine.
The method of checking out the "starter" repo https://www.lazyvim.org/installation and simply deleting the .git folder is a LOT nicer than an annoying installation script that does a gazillion things (LunarVim).
I've got a painstakingly crafted neovim config that approximately works how I want it to, most of the time, and I'm happy with it. But it's taken a while, a lot of nights inevitably spent mucking with plugins and LSP and gluing it all together instead of working on more rewarding things.
I'd be lying if I said I'd never thrown something at a wall in frustration due to vim acting in some bizarre, inexplicable way and not knowing why, although that definitely happens less nowadays with nvim.
I hadn't heard of lazyvim until the other day and I doubted I'd really need it, but now that I know it's something new from folke, I'm gonna have to give it a shot. Always quality stuff from him -- dude is a machine, when does he sleep?
LunarVIM has been a bit tricky, mostly related to upgrades around LunarVIM, usually neovim updates. But, the capabilities of having Language Server in vim have been so refreshing! Particularly when working with Python 2 code to bring it up to Python 3, pretty much just follow what Language Server says.
When it gets right down to it, there are only a couple little tweaks from my old setup I want to carry over, everything else I want to go back to using defaults (places where I've diverged my own functionality) and stop pushing around a poorly maintained manual config that gives me 10% of what Lunar or similar gives.