I've only given Helix a brief try, but I think there are some things to be excited about it as a keyboard-focused editor:

Its out-of-the-box experience seems much nicer than vim (or even kakoune).

Helix takes a lot of inspiration from kakoune. e.g. like kakoune, its command menu shows a description for the command. And, obviously, its modal editing puts emphasis on selection-then-action (compared to vim's verb-motion).

Helix puts a big emphasis on LSP and tree-sitter, rather than having these bolted-on as plugins.

I'm very interested in this project, but looking at the language support it needs to implement better Java support before it becomes relevant for me.

I'm also curious about how plugin support will be if it arrives.