Even I (as someone who has a profound hatred for MS and their business practices) have to admit that VSCode is vastly superior to Atom, which is why I have used the former instead of the latter for a long time.
I know it's not what you asked for but it's how I use it for a similar work flow. They don't close when I close the last file.
There were other issues too, the way they handed project folders, intellisense for Scala, but the slugginess was the main issue. I often had to debug large JSON files and while Brackets and VS Code would open them almost immediately, Atom would take several tens of seconds.
Also, personal issue was that I didn't like the default keybindings they had for macOS. I don't remember what they are anymore but there were lots of what I thought should've been obvious defaults that weren't.