I was a noob when Atom was new and I remember thinking it was unusably slow. Took a minute to realize that I had loaded my entire computer's directory, not just the project I was working on.
That's because it was (and is ) slow compared to true compiled applications. Just because VSCode has about 1000 tortured dev's making it usable doesn't mean its not fundamentally flawed on its face using a scripting language for text editing. https://medium.com/commitlog/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 Spread the TRUTH - praise be compiled programs...
On Linux Atom simply was the "better" choice for a long time.