Seems like Atom and VSCode picked the wrong tool for the job.

Both work fairly well, are popular and performance is satisfactory (unless you try to paste an 80k line JSON file into either of them, that doesn't work). Considering their success, wide availability and vibrant ecosystems, I'd say they picked the right tool for the job.

Not sure if eating memory like complex 3d modeling software (with model in it) for something what is at the end of the day basically just text editing is the right tool for the job. Energy with excluded externalities is cheap. So modern personal computers can bear anything. But should they?

It's a tradeoff. Because they are written using web technologies it means that they are very extensible.

If you are a professional then just buy more RAM.

>If you are a professional then just buy more RAM.

That cockiness sounds familiar, and it was the reason why people moved from Java based IDE's to vscode/atom/sublime.

It could be very extensible without being written in web technologies. For example, an IDE I worked on was written in C++ with Qt and had an embedded Python interpreter to allow extensions to be written easily. It also provided a .dll/.so extension mechanism for stuff that wanted more performance than Python could give.

It used 10-20 megs of RAM and loaded in about 2 seconds on the computers of the era (about 10-15 years ago).

It wasn't very good, but that's beside the point :-) It wasn't bad because of the technology stack it was built from.

No, as a professional you just pick better software.

Sufficient extensibility does not require software to be terrible.

They just chose other-people-choosing-the-wrong-tool-for-the-job as a business model.