At least Microsoft knows how not to make it suck so much.
They are planning to use neovim as a backend for it too.
Also neovim rewrite: https://github.com/Chillee/VSCodeNeovim
I like the idea of Oni, but I also love that Sublime is native (I'm already running FF Quantum, I can't burn too much more battery!). I know Sublime's Vim keybindings aren't that complete.
Sublime's vintage mode is, in my experience, light years better, if not in completeness, at least in stability.
The escape key issue you mentioned was the only problem I've also had, but it's due to conflicting keybinds between the vim plugin and the vscode bindings for dismissing notifications and context help. I rebound all of those to shift-esc (and I believe the plugin's bindings now do this by default) and the problem went away.
I have been keeping Oni and VSCode open while I work so I can use Oni for editing and VSCode for the nice diffs and replace in project functionality.
Code is a great editor/IDE and has a huge amount of development backing and now a pretty large market share as well, which means inertia. But the vim bindings for it are just garbage. They are slow, make the editor feel sluggish, they don't work "quite right", etc.
No kidding this sparked some inspiration, but now I'm just going to have to either look at Oni and be jealous forever until VSCode catches up (if it ever does), or switch to Oni and end up missing out on all the features and inertia of VSCode :/
Hopefully the work that goes into this newer editor will spark some inspiration and get some of the work offloaded to libraries which VSCode can use as well.