vim does this too. If it hangs on you when opening a very large file, don't hesitate to press Ctrl+C. It does not terminate the whole process, but aborts the syntax highlighting, and the editor becomes very snappy.
To proactively turn off syntax highlighting, bracket matching, and so forth, I use
alias vi='vim -u NONE'
which makes it skip vimrc.
VSCode disables syntax highlighting on very large files.