The are serious about local vs. remote vs. shared. They are serious about hardware acceleration because they care about users who type fast and edit big files. They care about real computer science on how to push the current hardware to serve the user, rather than treating the hardware as a crutch to give the user a slightly worse experience at a fraction of the development cost. They care about code highlighting the snippets on their blog like very similar to the default Zed theme.
These are cool, serious people. If they give me emacs key bindings with full paredit-everywhere, I might switch my daily driver.
And this is about using modern SIMD-style stuff, branch less stuff, Lemire stuff in a modern and relevant context. Other commenters have pointed out that you can do the mask or popcount better with intrinsically, and yeah, but they probably know that, and B. They got the massive win, the remaining factor of K on the pop count is coming.
Long Zed.