Do people really need that with modern computers? My computer is 10 years old and I just restarted VS in the last project I was working on. It was about 4-5 seconds before I could edit the text, which doesn't seem long. And I have 17GB available memory. Anyway it doesn't matter because I just don't restart VSCode that much. I do open projects in new windows and those can get slow, but the slow ones are mostly just rust code with rust-analyzer overhead, and when dealing with rust, slow-opening projects are only the beginning.
I don't know, it feels like Zed popularity is just people chasing the latest editor hotness, a time-honored traditional programmer ritual to be sure, but still, just a ritual. And now it seems zed devs have to put AI in front of all other initiatives, probably because of the VC funding they took.
I could see not wanting to use VSCode for other reasons, like MS pivoting back to "be evil", but at least in my little bubble, performance is not one of them.