Welcome here. I have been a guitar player for 40 years now, so I'm not totally unfamiliar with this situation...

One of the problems is that not many people who stop drinking stay stopped, so there may not be very many people recovering from their neuropathy either.

For those who do stay stopped, while recovery may not be 100% in most cases, the difference can be between constant pain and agony up to slight bother and having bad days. Peripheral nerves are slow to heal - for the same reason they are the first to fail. It is an ongoing process, and there will be setbacks as well. Expecting them and not freaking out is key. Stress is your enemy, especially when suffering from neuropathy.

I never lost motor nerve response in my hands, but did have the beginning of burning sensations and cramps. I'm now close to being 3 years sober, and both problems have gone away for 95%.

For me, apart from the usual vitamins, I found that a change in diet was extremely helpful. Touring alcoholic musicians aren't exactly known for having great diets to start with, but cleaning it up, avoiding sugar (which works in many ways like alcohol, and is processed in a similar way by the liver) was a tremendous help. And with sugar, I mean: fructose. Forget "natural": honey is natural but still contains the exact same fructose as white sugar. Managing carbs also goes a long way. Personally I read up on anti-inflammatory diets (Zone etc.) and found a way to make them work for me without going "zealot".

Also, for me, taking high quality fish oil has been a big help. And I know it's not just placebo: after I got 95% better I started slacking on both vitamins and omega3... Pain slowly came back but in a "frog in slowly boiling water" way: I only really noticed when I decided to commit to my diet/fish oil intake again. Different people react to different substances, but even most doctors know that omega3 can be a good help.

Like Icehouse said: maintaining sobriety is going to be the next important step. Stopping is one thing - especially when you see rapid improvement - but it is human to become complacent and think "hey, I'm OK now, I'm sure I can have a couple". That's where most of us go wrong, and why the statistics of alcoholic neuropathy don't look too promising.

As for playing guitar: a break would be a good thing, as he might start to hurt some muscles/joints because of the impaired feel/feedback. Slowly building up again using a very easy to play guitar with very light strings would be best. Back off when it starts to hurt, this is not a "no pain no gain" thing.

As for the music scene: you would be surprised how many sober musicians there are these days (and there have been). One book I can really recommend - as it helped me to reframe my "I'm a musican, a songwriter, an artist, I can't be sober!" stance is "Le Freak" by Nile Rodgers, one of the living guitar legends, a producer who sold about 300 million albums, and ... a horrible junkie living on cocaine and booze for most of the 80ties. He got sober in 1994, and writes freely and with humor about his breakdown and stay in rehab. He's been sober for 21 years now, and still had a number one hit last year with Daft Punk's "Get Lucky".

This book probably saved my life.

So yeah, it is absolutely possible to be sober and remain sober while being a working musician, but the commitment has to come from inside, and most people (if not all...) need some kind of program to help them to stay focused, and deal with sobriety.

Personally, I bought a grand piano from the money I saved on drinking in the first 2 years of sobriety, and playing around on that every day is one of the nicest feelings I had in a very long time. It beats drumming on empty bottles.

Good luck, lots of things to try, never give up hope.