I was a noob when Atom was new and I remember thinking it was unusably slow. Took a minute to realize that I had loaded my entire computer's directory, not just the project I was working on.
https://medium.com/commitlog/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32
Spread the TRUTH - praise be compiled programs...
On Linux Atom simply was the "better" choice for a long time.
My point is this: if we're being honest, all Electron-based editors suck. They're slow, and community-provided extensions are buggy and they integrate awkwardly with each other. But in my world (embedded firmware) there simply isn't a less-terrible option. VS Code is the least-terrible among them.
Maybe slow never was the problem is kinda what my point is. In the end it's just an editor for text.
As a firmware engineer, it's also frequently useful to be able to do hexdumps of large binary files in VS Code.