IIRC, the decision to pull VLC from the App Store was made by one of the VLC developers.

Apple pulled it due to it being copyright infringement. The VLC author released their code under the GPL licence, and Apple do not distribute software on the AppStore in a way that meets the GPL, and hence they were in breech of the licence and could not distribute it.

VLC, unlike Vim, is GPL software, which Apple ddi not allow on the AppStore/iOS. So can't see the same thing happening here.