Atom and VSCode are in different leagues with respect to performance, and the difference is growing with time. If you think the reason that Atom is slow is because of Electron, VSCode is the counterexample.
Since both are written with electron the difference must obviously be the actual implementation, not the platform itself.
Keep in mind VSCode was written by Microsoft who have decades of experience writing IDEs and text editors, whereas Atom was written by GitHub who are mostly working on the GitHub product.
VScode runs like a dream on my hexacore/8GB/SSD desktop, but brings my atom/2GB/32GBeMMC based Asus Eeebook X205TA to its knees. Native programs for low power systems seems sound practice to me.
