There is already a Light Mode version of IntelliJ designed to compete with Sublime Text and maybe VS Code. It's not entirely obvious that it exists and they need to market it way better, but if you run "idea whatever.txt" from the CLI and the IDE isn't already open, you'll open in light mode. It starts nearly instantly because it's not loading all the plugins and project infrastructure.

I didn't know about light mode. I'll definitely try it out.

And still, it's really cheap if you consider the amount of work you have to put into configuring other products like VS Code where you end up with an inferior experience. I think it pays off.

For a professional, jetbrains basically pays for itself within a day of starting to use it (in my opinion). I know a lot of people prefer VS code, but I frankly cannot imagine why.

Well being free is still a benefit. And it is much faster then then any jetbrains IDE.

I prefer jetbrains like you, but some people like their apps to be really snappy.

The only thing where I really perceive VS Code to be faster is startup

The rest might be a tiny bit slower but it more than makes up for it with better UI/UX, code always feels a bit awkward

This really depends. If I open 20 large projects in the same vs code workspace it literally dies.

Doing the same in Jetbrains IDE is painful, but possible.