Sublime is personally worth $0 to me because I wouldn't use it at all regardless of what I paid for it. And I say that as someone who bought every new version starting from the first one up until ~2018. VS Code is just that much better.
The trouble here is that "better" comes at a cost that the community has yet to truly realize, and Microsoft is very good at playing the long, slow bleed game; if strategic fractures[1] come to fruition, that debt will be repaid and it's going to be very expensive.
While reading this I realized I could easily say that cncf/k8s has fractured the container community.
Is there actually a cost, though? I mean, I understand the argument over the strategic aspect of adopting a tool that may or may not continue with acceptable terms, but is that risk really significant?
By now vscode is already 8 years old and there is no concrete hint that licensing will change. Even so it's hardly irreplaceable.
Isn't this one of those problems where it only makes sense to worry about them if they really happen?
I don't think usage alone does amount for anything. Other free offering will not go away and if something would happen, many (including me, a casual Code user) would simply switch back to what we used before, or a new thing.
MS will not manage to extuingish the "competition" because the competition doesn't even compete, they release their editors and IDEs and simply exist.
Perhaps my expectations on performance are ruined, but to me vscode feels very snappy even on old hardware.