It's performant because it's sucking your resources dry with a massive memory footprint, which is possible thanks to virtual memory. Doesn't mean it's ideal.
I realise that this might sound privileged/gate-keeping but if you're a developer in 2020 I'd expect you to at least have 8GB of RAM. I'd say it's the minimum you should have for a decent computing experience nowadays. I have 16GB and usually idle around 50% usage with just a general task load. Especially with Windows 10. Not that it's a good thing but it seems to be the way things are going.
1/8th of your memory for your IDE doesn't sound too bad?
Your browser using just as much, if not more than VS code does so try again. Nowadays an IDE using 1 gig of ram isn't that horrible when it saves you tons of development time with it's tooling.
Why does the browser also using a lot of RAM mean VS Code should? Aren’t those different applications with different purposes? E.g., is it equally valid to compare VS Code to Excel or Photoshop?
The main problem with this argument is just a few years ago, before Atom and VS Code, most people were using editors like Sublime Text that use an order of magnitude less resources and are still significantly faster than the Electron editors. Regardless of whether VS Code is a better editor, or a better architecture, it's still an interesting question whether the dramatic increase in resources was necessary.
This is interesting to me. Do you care _why_ the apps you use are performant, if they already are? Is it noticeably impacting the performance of other apps you're actively using?
The implication of “sucking your resources dry with a massive memory footprint” in the comment your replying to, is that in order to make VS Code fast, it slows down your system in other ways. I don’t know how valid that is, but it’s certainly not “caring why”, it's about the other performance consequences that aren’t VS Code itself running slowly.
1/8th of your memory for your IDE doesn't sound too bad?
I've seen native tools use more.