There is already a Light Mode version of IntelliJ designed to compete with Sublime Text and maybe VS Code. It's not entirely obvious that it exists and they nee

There is already a Light Mode version of IntelliJ designed to compete with Sublime Text and maybe VS Code. It's not entirely obvious that it exists and they need to market it way better, but if you run "idea whatever.txt" from the CLI and the IDE isn't already open, you'll open in light mode. It starts nearly instantly because it's not loading all the plugins and project infrastructure.