Why do you think your issue has anything to do with electron? That sounds like a meme.

It is your drives, no? Does the browser make your system drives work a bunch? Much more likely, it is VSCode running ripgrep (rg in htop/activity monitor) in the background to find symbols in your codebase.

That would be exactly the same regardless of GUI toolkit.

edit: misread "system drives me bananas" as pertaining to "system drives" nvm