It's not "pretty much the exact same thing". ST is much faster and can handle very large files (say, CSVs in the hundreds of MBs) (as an aside, VS Code is much more performant than Atom)
Editing large CSV files is something I do infrequently enough that I'll just use vim or whatever when that need arises. No need to choose my code editor based on that niche use-case.
I use Atom, and it is not "pretty much the exact same thing".
the exact same thing, slowed down to a crawl.
Then use Atom and don't comment
The parent comment is valid for every software in the world, if you make your living with a 80$ software and you don't want to pay for it, you have big issues
Parent has a point. (Legitimately not paying is a reasonable choice.)