Anyway, agree with the author. Everytime I use web- or electron-app I'm just expecting sluggishness, ugliness and weird behaviors and refresh the page (=restart the app) all the time. It's just a norm. I guess no matter how people pretend that typesetting engine from 80-s is a good UI stack, they still have to pay huge price in usability, performance and orders of magnitude higher memory usage.
For me, with Code completely exited (i.e., not in the dock at all), it takes about 1 second to start drawing and about 4 or 5 to finish rendering all the icons and such and be fully usable. Even IntelliJ (now THAT's slow) only takes about 6 or 7 seconds to fully load. On a M1 too.
Do you have some weird antivirus or similar scanning all your apps...?
No, I don't have any antivirus, and generally very concerned about what's running in the background (I delete apps from LaunchAgents dir, avoid keeping hungry Electron apps in the background unless really needed, etc).
It's never taken more than a few seconds to load... whether on M1 or x86 Macs or Windows. How weird.
Meanwhile, NeoVim is consistently starting under 500ms for me, even being heavy loaded with plugins and offering all the same functionality (NeoVim is pretty awesome as an IDE these days).
I run VSCode (on Linux) on a number of different low- to mid-end machines between a 5 and 10 years old and it starts within 2-3 seconds on all of them. New windows/tabs open basically instantly. I ran it once on a Raspberry Pi just for fun and even then it was entirely bearable.
I can only imagine you are loading a bunch of extensions, or maybe one or two extremely heavy ones. It's never anywhere near as snappy as plain Vim, of course. And I am not easy to please nor a fan of Electron apps in general but VSCode has been fairly tolerable for me over the years.