I have decided against Aura because it splits the commands for AUR from the standard repos. With paru I can upgrade both by running just paru. In the end, that’s all I mostly do with an aur helper.

It also means that the rendering will potentially be different on each platform given they all use different native webviews (and there’s no “native” webview on Linux but WebKit-gtk is the most widely used one)

Not really. Helix is closer to Kakoune which is based on the modal editing of Vim but reimagined a bit.

There’s a pretty simple reason. It’s that developers don’t have to spend the time to package for every single distro. I know I wouldn’t, I’d just focus on packaging for the distro that I use and flatpak. Having flatpak also means that some less known distros start with a big amount of apps available from the get go with flatpak.