Compared to Sublime Text VSCode is sluggish and hilariously bad at handling large files. Compared to Android Studio, VSCode is lean and very fast.

In my opinion it's in a comfortable "fast enough" position, and from the very beginning the VSCode team has shown a great dedication to having the best possible performance in the particular technology stack they have chosen. It's just equally true that they have chosen a technology stack that puts easy extensibility over performance.

I switched away from sublime text because it only had a fraction of the features and extensions. Perhaps I'm just not using files large enough, most of our source modules top out at a few thousand lines of code.

And VSCode could be much, much worse. I tried AstroNvim on neovim for a while after it got some attention here. It consistently started up slower for me than VSCode does.

Compared to the others neovim should theoretically be snappier. Could it be bogged down by 3rd party plugins or something? If so try to switch to the lazy.nvim plugin manager which does a great job of lazy loading plugins, but more importantly allows you to profile the startup time and tweak loading mechanisms until you find a desirable balance between loading plugins and startuptime.

For me, Neovim has always been faster than VS Code and that was before switching to Lazy plugin manager.