But you shouldn't need high end hardware to run a text editor.
I have a pretty generic Lenovo running Linux. VSCode is way more responsive (as OP says, smooth as butter) than Atom on it.
On my old macbook air (4 years old) VScode run way more smoothly and start 2 or 3 times faster than Atom.
It's interesting how people seem to have very different experiences with lag on vscode. I wonder if it's actually much more laggy on some system configurations. What are your running it on?
Not surprising since most people have their own pool of extensions that they'll install but fail to mention any time the topic comes up. This is the "Firefox is beastly" strain of criticism all over again.
I've noticed that VSCode + the JSX plugin, when run concurrently with webpack in watch mode, cause my machine to thrash. Working theory is that they are both watching the large node_modules folder, but yet to confirm.