Actually, this was only the third such mode, after vi.el and vip.el, both of which were obsoleted by Viper (which itself dates back to … many years ago)

I don’t understand why “the app is now built reproducibly” implies “you need to uninstall it and then reinstall”. What am I missing?

My main development machine has 8 GB, for what it’s worth. And most of the software in use nowadays was developped when 8GB was a lot of RAM