The original scheme that made me realize this should always be the goal was Steve Losh's BadWolf [1]

Control flow & operators etc are dark red, identifiers more or less neutral, and top level functions accented. This makes it easy to scan quickly, because you want to be able to navigate a file quickly without getting bogged down in a rainbow of color and then slow down down to understand the tricky bits.

Just reading the comments provided a lot of insight on things like accent color usage.

Im very used to warm colors now so Gotham is the closet spiritual thing in VSCode to this.

[1] https://github.com/sjl/badwolf/ https://raw.github.com/sjl/badwolf/master/colors/badwolf.vim