The last two are more of disadvantages; The remote setup eats a lot of memory from the remote machine, and needs an excellent internet connection, and can't integrate with local editing (You have to use two separate windows, and it's in general nowhere as neat as tramp). The saved prefs are synced without version control, which means you can't really count on them.
Never understood why other editors, like ST, didn't give more UI options (checkboxes, buttons, dropdowns, a canvas, etc) to plugin authors. Consider how clunky a lot of plugin interactions with limited UI widgets available to them are.
But even if other editors started giving more freedom to design your plugin with more widgets etc, they could never beat the freedom HTML/CSS gives.
The second huge advantage of VSC: Microsoft behind it updating it non-stop. TextMate stalled, ST seems abandoned for long stretches of time (and it's not like we "already solved code-editing, what more you want") because of lack of manpower, etc.
The third advantage of VSC: first-class support for plugins, with "package manager" and storage built-in: plugin discovery, install, uninstall, enable/disable, configure, are all a click away. ST has this too, but not as refined as VSC, but more like a tacked-on text-based experience.
Two more advantages of VSC:
- remote development tools (MS). Code in your laptop, run/debug in SSH/Docker/WSL environment.
- automatically saved/synced preferences. This came in in this release.
I'm not in favor of Electron apps over native. But VSC is really that good.