Yeah I agree about it being something that's done because you enjoy it. Talking about what's an efficient use of time is so strange to me though, not to single you out in particular. It's like we're pretending our lives are so hyper-optimized that everything is a delicate trade-off. I spend a few hours here and there messing around with my setup because I want it to feel nice to use. It's not like I traded a couple hours of productive programming time for that. Sometimes I spend a few hours watching a movie.
For me a snappy editor experience, and vim in general, is about comfort, not optimizing for some theoretical top editing speed. I don't think I'd be a drastically worse programmer if I were forced to use windows notepad to edit code, I would just be more uncomfortable all the time.
Sure, VSCode is a power hog and it's slow, but I make pretty good money so the cost of a more powerful development machine is trivial compared to the opportunity cost of doing all that research. Some years I really enjoy learning all about new ways to configure vim/nvim, but I recognize that it's really not an efficient use of my time, it's just been something I do more for fun.