Your anecdotes seem to be directly contradicted by hard data. IDEA with zero latency typing[1] has an order of magnitude lower latency than vscode[2]
Lint/hints taking forever to update after code editing, autocomplete popup takes a second to show, etc. This depends on codebase naturally but in my experience for the cases where VS Code works well (mostly typescript) on the same codebase and same PC it's much more responsive than IDEA tools or Visual Studio (and I'm running this on a i9 MBP with 32GB ram so not a weak HW thing).
I type on a 60hz monitor and I'm not particularly sensitive to that kind of latency (this is where I consider VS Code good enough)
I mean sure, faster is better, but door unlock speed is probably not the problem that makes people think a car is “slow”.