Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in <1 second, and it still does today. Vim and co are instant.
Also keep in mind that desktop computers haven't gotten significantly faster for tasks like opening applications in the past years; they're more efficient (especially the M line CPUs) and have more hardware for specialist workloads like what they call AI nowadays, but not much innovation in application loading.
You use a lot of words like "pretty close to", "nearly", "essentially", but 10, 20 years ago they WERE instant; applications from 10, 20 years ago should be so much faster today than they were on hardware from back then.
I wish the big desktop app builders would invest in native applications. I understand why they go for web technology (it's the crossplatform GUI technology that Java and co promised and offers the most advanced styling of anything anywhere ever), but I wish they invested in it to bring it up to date.
Do any of those do the indexing that cause the slowness? If not it's comparing apples to oranges.
11 years ago I put in a ticket to slack asking them about their resource usage. Their desktop app was using more memory than my IDE and compilers and causing heap space issues with visual studio. 10 years ago things were exactly the same. 15 years ago, my coworkers were complaining that VS2010 was a resource hog compared to 10 years ago. My memory of loading photoshop in the early 2000’s was that it took absolutely forever and was slow as molasses on my home PC.
I don’t think it’s necessarily gotten worse, I think it’s always been pathetically bad.
My corporate vpn app is a disaster on so many levels, it’s an internally developed app as opposed to Okta or anything like that.
I would likewise say that your experience is not universal, and that in many circumstances the situation is much worse. My wife is running an i5 laptop from 2020 and her work intranet is a 60 second load time. Outlook startup and sync are measured in minutes including mailbox fetching. You can say this is all not the app developers fault, but the crunch that’s installed on her machine is slowing things down by 5 or 10x and that slowdown wouldn’t be a big deal if the apps had reasonable load times in the first place.
There's native apps just as, if not more, complicated than VSCode that open faster.
The real problem is electron. There's still good, performant native software out there. We've just settled on shipping a web browser with every app instead.
The problem is when you load it and then react and all its friends, and design your software for everything to be asynchronous and develop it on a 0 latency connection over localhost with a team of 70 people where nobody is holistically considering “how long does it take from clicking the button to doing the thing I want it to do”
On my work machine slack takes five seconds, IDEA is pretty close to instant, the corporate VPN starts nearly instantly (although the Okta process seems unnecessarily slow I'll admit), and most of the sites I use day-to-day (after Okta) are essentially instant to load.
I would say that your experiences are not universal, although snappiness was the reason I moved to apple silicon macs in the first place. Perhaps Intel is to blame.