Where will they find people willing to continue working on vim's code base
the same place where neovim found its developers. if one group of people can organize themselves to maintain and develop their version of vim. so can another. i don't know how many contributors vim has, but i am sure they can figure out how to move forward. finding new leadership can be difficult when there is no clear candidate, but if the contributors had not wanted to work on vim they would not have been there in the first place.
i didn't realize that. given this and what others say about how bram treated contributions, i'd think it's best to put the original vim into maintenance mode and keep it as the version that bram intended. there is no need for another group of developers to emerge if it wasn't already there when they most likely would just end up repeating what neovim already did, since none of them would be a replacement to do things the "bram" way, especially considering that bram apparently was reimplementing many neovim features anyways.
it feels to me that not changing vim would be what bram would have wanted. any new developments may as well happen in neovim.
of course anyone who disagrees or doesn't like where neovim is heading may fork vim and make their own version of it.
the same place where neovim found its developers. if one group of people can organize themselves to maintain and develop their version of vim. so can another. i don't know how many contributors vim has, but i am sure they can figure out how to move forward. finding new leadership can be difficult when there is no clear candidate, but if the contributors had not wanted to work on vim they would not have been there in the first place.