TRAMP is generally performant enough with vanilla Emacs, but there are plenty of popular packages that utterly tank TRAMP performance. The big culprit I’ve personally found was helm. It made TRAMP unusable. You may also need to deal with some finnicky settings both in Emacs and in your remote shell to get it running satisfactorily.

I totally agree though that VS Code has a way better out or the box remote coding experience.