Yes, but on the other hand, IDEs are slow. I don't mean to say VSCode is lightning fast, but it starts in less than a second. By that time, IntelliJ didn't even open it's loading window. And were talking about a top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 laptop with an NVMe SDD.

For longer sessions that's not a problem, but when you're on battery or quickly hopping into the project to look something up it makes a lot of difference. Also, opening up a foreign project is two clicks and one second, compared to project creation and then loading+indexing when using IntelliJ.

I love the IntelliJ line of IDEs. But VSCode outcompetes it in simplicity by far. Especially when we're talking about something like a simple Node project, where compilation+execution is far simpler than something with a full build pipeline with artefacts.