It must be tough to see how quickly the community turns on you when something better (in some ways) comes around.
Atom clearly offered something that struck a chord when it initially appeared. I remember having an idea, and implementing it as a plugin, all within a lazy Sunday afternoon. This allowed the ecosystem to flourish, and new ideas being extremely easy to at least prototype.
It also allowed unprecedented[0] access to almost everything.
The latter turned out to be somewhat of a curse, unfortunately. Because the wide-ranging access allowed extension authors, and their users, to shoot themselves in the foot: It often lead to performance degradation, instability, murky UIs etc. Such troubles would usually be attributed to Atom itself. This was the groundwork for the narrative to almost instantly flip when VSCode appeared.
VSCode itself took the lessons from Atom, which must make it even more painful to now see it glorified vis-a-vis Atom: Extensions have to work through tightly defined protocols, and are never run on the main threat. This works well to avoid performance issues and to keep the UI from disintegrating. But it is also a severe limitation on the freedom to experiment, which is why that extension I once tried my hand on could not possibly be build in VSCode (it renders block comments written in Markdown as HTML right in the source code, including images, diagrams, links etc.)
[0]: Yeah, I'm sure there's some other editor that did it before. But somehow Atom got it right with Javascript as the language, and maybe the UI and documentation steering people to actually try it.