If you can make something 10k x faster you didn’t so much fix it as just switch it to working correctly as it should have in the first place.
VSCode is a good tool, but it’s unbearably slow, and it breaks my heart that so much development has converged on something written in electron with such a low regard for performance by any measure.
I disagree with all points here.
The speed performance became possible by being able to implement this within VSCode's core rather than over the extensions API. Without proving the value proposition as an extension first, it'd be difficult to get a change like this merged into core at the start.
Also, VSCode is by far the fastest IDE I've ever used. I occasionally need to interact with IntelliJ, Android Studio, and XCode. The difference in responsiveness is night and day. Before VSCode, I would almost exclusively just use Vim. It's silly to be bashing it as a "slow" Electron app when it's measurably way faster than XCode, a native IDE developed by a company with an integration advantage of being in control the underlying OS and hardware.
You don't understand.
Electron = slow and big install
Even if other tools are objectively slower and bloatier, it is a immutable law that Electron = slow and big install
Even if that's true, there should be a reason, or a cause at least, that VSCode dominated over most IDEs out there.
In my experience, other IDEs have either a really high learning curve, needless bloat, or are closer to a notepad with extra features rather than a full fledged developing environment.
You can open VSCode and be welcomed by a lot of development features right on your face and wander through a lot of recommended add ons that add extra value out of the box. Also, since is electron based, multiplatform support is a no brainer.
Meanwhile, everyone is absolutely free to create a native VSCode clone. But that isn't happening at least for now. Maybe UI toolkits are a mess, maybe trying to mimic an UI in a 2D library is a PITA, maybe it's that an extensions engine needs to implement some "easier to develop" language (like javascript or Lua) and a full fledged interpreter for it, and it's so much work one would rather stick with Electron and be done with it.
Everyone hates VSCode, but nobody ever has managed to offer a competing alternative.