That sounds like an OS/hardware problem, honestly. There's no reason vim with any setup should lock up a machine.
I actually have better performance with Sublime Text and JavaScript than I do with vim and JavaScript. I wish that weren’t the case.
If you know if any better ways to get vim working with Syntastic for linting (eslint), I would love to know.
Also, you can choke vim with large (>5gb) test files. Or is that fixed now?
I seem to recall (though haven't tried it for a while) that the Visual Studio Code editor handles them okay.
It's not a big issue -- since these are machine-generated, it's not normally necessary to edit them by hand. Every once in a while, though, I'll accidentally click on one of them in the file tree. Then I'll curse and kill the editor process.