I kinda disagree with this. I have definitely noticed that my cursor can be slow to respond when some linting/formatting (I can't quite tell what is causing it, I just notice it) is going on. Totally usable, but I'm also coming from emacs and it's not like emacs is known to be blazing fast so I actually think my experience is sort of inline with the article's point.

Despite or because of emacs being older, it's more responsive than vscode in my usage.

They care about and test for performance issues/regressions.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue+labe...

Have you ever used Sublime or Vim?

Vscode is fast compared to most modern editors, but it's still twice as slow as Sublime in terms of input latency, UI responsiveness, text coloring etc.

An hour with Sublime/Vim followed by going back to Vscode is a painful experience...