I've used vim every single day at work for ~12 years. With the kids I rarely do at the weekends but I happened to be setting up my .vimrc on a relatively recent laptop this afternoon. Big impact on my life for a guy whose name I never knew until 2 minutes ago.
I use Vim since 31 years. Started in 1992, on Amiga with Fred Fish disks. I use Vim daily at work since 20 years. It's like a second home for me, a familiar tool which makes me confident that it'll help me manage whatever task I throw at it. I never had the pleasure to encounter Bram to tell him how much his work helped me throughout the years. I should have sent a "thank you for your hard work" mail when it was still possible. Now I can only send condolences. And some money to the ICCF. That's the least I can do.
You definitely have a point about the "thank you"-messages. I don't think I've ever sent a message like that to the author of any software, but I think it might be time to start, especially for software that is the product of (or spawned from) the hard work of a single person or a small group.
Sad news, 62 is way too early. I've been using Vim and the Vim modes/plugins of various IDEs (currently IntelliJ) for many years now, so I'm going to donate to ICCF in his memory.
I just started using vim binding seriously a year ago and using vim generally to work with code. I'm so grateful for his (and everyone else's work) on this product. I can only hope that my software can make such an impact on the world.