[Shrezzing]

>We're talking thousands of source files and god knows how many node_modules entries.

I think most VSCode features are disabled for node_modules directories by default.

At a guess, I'd say re-disabling that in your workspace file would resolve all of your performance issues. For even simple projects you'd be including hundreds of MB of text files, and thousands of subdirectories.

[bemusedthrow75]

They are indeed -- and it will avoid similarly costly stuff on anything you .gitignore.