Bram was notoriously possessive of the Vim project and consistently avoided bringing in other lead maintainers or adding widely demanded features (like async processing). Maybe that changed while I wasn’t paying attention, but it had a lot to do with the very successful neovim fork. Bram eventually added an async feature but not before neovim exploded in popularity.
It’s tragic to hear of Bram’s passing, and at such a young age. I will be interested to see what happens to the Vim project now, in his absence.