There are a ton of editors both free and paid for that niche you mentioned. Visual Studio code wasn't even the first one made with Electron, there was one called Atom before it. I have used and continue to use Sublime Text, and at work they install Notepad++ on all computers by default.

I guess though if you're coming from raw notepad then that is a step up.

And with anything "browser based" like VS Code you're going to always spawn a ton of processes to do even the simplest things.