Vscode is actually "light year ahead" across the board with newer/niche languages like rust or ocaml. They invented LSP which makes supporting new languages way easier without compromising intelligence.

Now if you use a mainstream programming language, intellij is light years away and not realizing it is proof of ignorance. It would be too long to list all of what intellij has to offer feature wise. The insanely huge amount of static analysis for improving your code quality is a sufficient example. The VCS integration, the semantic highlighting, all the kind of hints, of visualization, their better autocompletion, refactorings and so on. I extensively used vscode before and intellij changed my life, it make programming better and easier. To show you the order of magnitude difference: let's compare the commits count: Vscode has 72000 commits. Intellij community edition has 295000 commits Now realize that intellij ultimate edition probably has gotten twice that amount of human resources.

The performance is the worth it downside, and it is improving at each release, I'm on early adopter versions (which are free btw with premium features) + use prebuilt indexes and I can finally begin to say that most of the time idea feel fast (on a 4 years old ThinkPad)

"all the kind of hints": I don't think this is the job of an IDE, this is something that linters do very well and I trust them more than I trust a software that tries to do all things under the sun. Take python for example, vscode has support for 8 or so popular linters and will populate useful hints if you intstall one or even many of them. So you have both power and choices.

It may have better autocomplete for some language (I doubt typescript) or refactoring but those are things I don't really care about that much. I've used those in kotlin & scala, their support seem nice but the hints and refactoring didn't blow my mind or anything.

This. Maintaining a usable work environment in VSCode is just too time consuming.

I pretty much only use vs code for Rust and random text editing, and even then that's mostly using Rust Analyzer, so I could just as happily use Sublime.