Nobody forces you to use Visual Studio Code, vim and emacs are still around.

As VSC is vastly successful, the analogy with manufacturing or gaming industry obviously does not hold: the software development 'industry' does not only take a good look at VSC, it has already accepted it as viable product.

So Microsoft is right in investing into great IDE features rather than reducing VSCs resource footprint.

I assume that similar arguments can be made for every popular Electron-based application.