> When you hear the words "Yup, we do Agile, but we have our own take on it," run away, because it's going to suck hard.
Every team/company has their own take on Agile, copying what other successful teams do verbatim doesn't necessarily work. There are objectively many wrong ways to do Agile (your above example being one) but not any single "correct" way.
> It also means I never get a "process is running" prompt like in IntelliJ or Emacs when I want to exit.
No, instead you find that you can't :q - or type anything for that matter - because everything's frozen while vim is realising that the network drive is down, or you're waiting for the syntax highlighting to finish.
Changing his mind (without hinting that he may have been wrong) was a step in the right direction, and he did propose a clean fix that will prevent other similar bugs, but he flagged this as a wishlist which shows that he still doesn't consider it to be of major importance. He could always safeguard the script and treat his suggestion as a wishlist item, which would have been more reasonable.
Every team/company has their own take on Agile, copying what other successful teams do verbatim doesn't necessarily work. There are objectively many wrong ways to do Agile (your above example being one) but not any single "correct" way.