It’s possible the cat figured out you are not a cat person and that it needed to be sweet tempered and well behaved to continue living with a human.
It’s possible you are similar to your neighbor and the cat had already figured out how it needed to behave.
Perhaps. It took a year and a half though of feeding in the yard before the cat let me pet him. And it was another six months before the cat came into the house, briefly. Two years later, he is now entirely an indoor cat. In sum, if anything, it was a year of gentle and kind treatment of the cat that made me a cat person.