I've done some other things in the meantime, some Java, some iOS development, etc. I tried Atom for a while, but it was just too sluggish. Then came VS Code, and for a good while that was the One. And to date, VS Code still gets frequent major updates and active development.
However, nowadays when I scan the changelog, 99% of it is just not relevant. They spent a ton of development time building a terminal client into it. Which I guess makes sense for the use case where it's an in-browser editor, but personally I could have done without. Other things I don't really use are debuggers, remote editing, etc. It's still snappy enough, but I don't know if it's still relevant for me.
For the past year or so, I've been using intellij as my primary editor for everything; JS and TS support are now good enough, performance is good enough, and it's a big help with Go, old PHP / JS, etc code.
But I'm still nostalgic about ST from a decade ago, how fast and frequently I would just go `subl somefile` and it would be just There. Or the time I found a todo plugin that just worked fast and intuitively. Or the joys of cmd + p to open a file quickly, or fast global find & replace (really useful if cmd+click on a function doesn't navigate to said function).
I just hope it works well with existing system and languages, e.g. using the TS language server or Gopls. I don't need it anymore as an all day working environment, but quick and dirty editing, yes please.
Anyway yeah I just bought a license.