It's not about it being locked to a commercial product — whatever they built would be provider-agnostic. My understanding is the decision is more about not wanting to build things into core that are evolving so quickly and not wanting to rely on experimental LSP features (though I think inline completions are becoming standard soon[1]). Zed itself is perfect evidence of that -- they built an AI integration and then basically had to throw it away and rebuild it because the consensus best practice design changed. The Helix maintainers don't have time for that kind of churn and aren't trying to keep up with the hype cycle. When the plugin system is ready people will be able to choose their preferred implementation, and maybe eventually some aspects of it will make it into core.

[1]: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/specifi...