Comparing it to Atom etc. It takes like 3 seconds to load a medium-sized Python project for me. And I was a long time vim user. The speed of vim is not worth the ridiculous gap in features.

Which gap? There are so many plugins. The only use I did of vscode this last year was to use the drawio integration and now I am doing diagram as code when I need to with mermaidjs or python diagrams and no longer uses it.

Even if it took 3 minutes to load it wouldn't matter because I plan to work on the project for days if not hours. OTOH, like you mentioned feature parity just puts VSCode in a different league altogether.

3 minutes(the imagined extreme scenario) pales in comparison the hours of time most people waste in meetings, or sipping coffee, or chatting with colleagues.

Just how much do you plan to achieve in 3 minutes?

You seem to not be aware that intellisense LSP support is available in many other editors than vscode.