From my experience out of the box you get poor performance and you have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to change configuration to improve it as knowledge is scattered in many places and not always up to date. Then it still likes to stall from time to time or sometimes doesn't register key presses properly. It's a poor user experience, but even worse is that alternatives are often worse. I wish there was an editor with low latency, smart search, some proper file system database, so it doesn't take ages to open a directory and built in VCS support, that works quicker than manually issuing commands in a terminal.

I think the success of VSCode is because you can easily open it in your current directory from the terminal and it will show you your folder etc. without having to setup a project first and that you are ready to type you code quickly after opening. If I had to open PyCharm every time I want to try some Python in a new directory, I would probably start questioning my life choices. Before VSCode I would just use nano or Sublime.