It's actually surprisingly decent after you've enabled the Java extensions. vscode is noticably faster, and has generally most of the important features at this point too, though they're sometimes hard to discover (i.e you'll need to go through the command palette for creating a new class, instead of right click -> create a new class)

I still default to intellij though but I'm paying for a private license, so i might just be biased

"Create class" is not an important feature.

Jumping straight to implementations, finding all callers, immediately finding all invalid sites when you update a function, refactoring function signatures, extracting+lifting+moving methods, rewriting code into newer styles, decompiling and jumping into external libraries when debugging, understanding things like Spring config files ... the list just goes on.

Most of that works to a degree. The create class was just an example.

Fwiw: I'm not trying to convince anyone to switch over to vscode either... But it is surprisingly decent once you get used to the fact that you have to trigger basically everything through the command palette.

And some of the named features occasionally fail spectacularly with intellij too, depending on the project.

It's not as bad as you think. Eclipse has LSP daemon[1] that can be used by any editor that speaks LSP.

[1]: https://github.com/eclipse/eclipse.jdt.ls

It depends on how much time you spend getting your editor setup.