VS Code is built on Electron, which means it has a huge advantage from my point of view as a user: I can just remove stuff from the UI that I don't need and tweak it a bit with a few lines of CSS. I'm not sure what quite big sacrifices I'm making for this.

There are definitely awful Electron apps, but that's usually because of the developers, not because of Electron.

I can do the same on emacs too, says nothing about electron, just that you are familiar with css/js.

You can do the same with emacs because it's hackable enough, but you probably can't do the same with other native non-hackable apps like Word or Photoshop. I could do the same almost as easily with any Electron app, kind of like you can customize any website on your browser.