You're overlooking the fact that the reason that VSCode is good is precisely that electron enables a high development velocity. Edit: also, if you read the art

You're overlooking the fact that the reason that VSCode is good is precisely that electron enables a high development velocity. Edit: also, if you read the article, you'll find that the 10k x performance increase is a comparison between the performance of a third-party extension and the performance once that extension has been rewritten and inlined into VSCode itself. It's not like they were being accidentally quadratic or something.