Electron may be great for people who want to write Web apps, but browsers are RAM and CPU hungry beasts compared to the GUI toolkits they're trying to replace.
In short, which environments are running VSCode smoothly? Do I need next gen hardware to run a damn IDE smoothly?
Web apps have some advantages, but performance is nowhere in that list.
Having a huge git repo could poyentially hurt; would be interesting to test. Who knows maybe vim mode is partly to blame? I personally still mainly use vim, not vscode, so I don't know what usual suspects there are. It'd be awesome if there's good profiling that can show what plugins are taking significant time in the core loop. We have brutal eslint to apply but that for example all happens async. Once again, we're back where we started, of one bad situation - some random plugin somewhere - creating a lightning rod for disdain.
As with 90% of everything, people take a bunch of highly viable indicators to decide their opinions & then shit on anything & everything that doesn't meet their set conception. People hate electron because they think of Slack, but Slack has shit ass architecture. Dump it's web data and you'll find dozens of multi-megabyte indexeddb databases with mostly duplicate data. It's just a shit app. You can build shit apps in anything. But vscode being slick fast & smooth doesn't register for anyone. The negative conceptions dominate & rule, are the things that get posted, actively, and with energy. It's a damned shame.