With Vim being such a complete and powerful piece of software that still receives useful yet light features and is extensible to a dizzying degree, it's hard to push vscode on programmers that want an efficient tool.

Tramp mode (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode) has been part of emacs for some time now.

I tried vscode's remote capabilities. Ended up back on SSH/tmux/vim workflow. Ctrl-p file lookup was too slow, I like my shell, I didn't find the vscode terminal to be the best terminal experience

Help me understand more: what are "remote capabilities" wrt vscode?

I kicked the tires on vscode and atom and while I liked lots of things about them, it seemed like they were kinda overboard with memory consumption. These things are ultimately running web browsers, right? I'll probably have to give it another look.

Does vscode have vim emulation or actual vim that runs plugins. If it's the former, your statement is ludicrous.

sshfs has been a thing I've used with any editor for at least a decade. Making it part of the editor itself instead of the file manager is bloaty.

How is it better than the good old remote deployment feature in Pycharm?