Why did they choose to base their editor on Electron, of all things, especially considering the existing results of Atom (horrible) is beyond me.
Electron is essentially Node grafted to Chromium... There are a few things that could be done, but would depend on a lot of upstream cooperation to do so.
By giving performant lower level access to render, may be VSC can move some of the perf sensitive code directly to compiled optimized binaries.
Sort of like what node native libraries do.
Sublime does some pretty great dark magic. I was impressed to see vscode approach similar speeds to sublime in search. I believe there is plenty that can be done to make rendering fast, reduce memory consumption and make it a bit light weight. But it would require access to metal APIs
Also, as an Electron app, there is a node element, so compiled components are already an option.
In addition 1M+ plugins, open-source, cross-platform etc will keep cool kids not just happy but they will also aggressively challenge whoever is using old but efficient software products.