Updates. By Jeff Kreeftmeijer

Replying to twitter.com/chrisheithoff/status/1072126468891697152

I didn’t, but you’re absolutely right. It’s in $VIMRUNTIME/plugin/matchit.vim in neovim 0.3.1, which loads it by default (:echo exists("loaded_matchit") returns 1) while Vim 8 doesn’t. Like you said, it needs to be explicitly loaded with :packadd! matchit.