The only good thing to come from this new editor so far is the frank statement by the original Atom Developers (who invented Electron, just to run Atom) admitted that Electron is not a good solution for a code editor, because who in the heck wants to edit their code in a web browser anyway.
Now we just need to convince the devs of Keybase and Obsidian the same.
What VSCode uses is a super cut down and highly optimised version of electron, designed specifically to run a code editor. It's still not as good as real native code, but a lot of people are willing to put up with it because the plugins available for VSCode are pretty good.
For me, it is more "better than the competition." PlattormIO for example is extremely jank and I run into an out of date library that prevents it from compiling. Of course there is no error saying anything remotely related to that, so it's at least one, 30 minute google searching session per project to correct libraries using old, broken dependencies.
Not to mention that the build and upload buttons on the command bar literally don't work at all. In windows I have to use the built in terminal to build or upload and in linux at least the build and upload buttons in the PIO sidebar work.
But the problem is that it is STILL easier, faster, and has more features than the competition. In my (only embedded devices) experience, it is still faster than pieces of shit like STM32CubeIDE, MPLabX, and Eclipse as far as speed and user-friendliness. Doesn't help that STM ships a bunch of broken HAL libraries for chips outside of their main moneymakers.