[mcbits]

I'm surprised you didn't encounter the issue with VSCode on Ubuntu 18.04, as that's where I ran into it.

https://github.com/electron/libchromiumcontent/issues/384

tl;dr (as I understand it) is that a change in FreeType invalidated an assumption that programs were making in how fonts were rendered, making text look garbled. It was fixed pretty quickly in Chromium and Firefox, but it took a few months to trickle through to Electron and finally to the apps based on it. In the meantime, Linux distros had started upgrading to the new "fixed" (seemingly broken) FreeType, so the workaround was to downgrade FreeType until any affected Electron apps were updated.