My guess is that if anything, they'd turn Atom over to an external body to maintain and let it sink/swim on its own. Currently they seem to be fine with having both, which is cool. Maybe it is to have two separate teams work on different ideas and see which ones work and mainline it into Visual Studio Code? Not sure.

I wish Visual Studio Code replaced Visual Studio, but unfortunately, it still holds value if working against Microsoft's stack. I like having them both and will occasionally use Code for .NET edits, but you definitely feel like it is missing some comforts at the very least when using it.