> VSCode is much closer to Eclipse than nano in its capabilities.

What exactly can it do that Vim or Emacs can't? Vim starts up literally 100 times faster on my machine, with 17 active plugins. It also runs everything in a single thread and is still more responsive than VSC in almost all scenarios.

What are those stupendously complex features that somehow make a slow start unavoidable? Or to go with your comparison, why do you think Eclipse has a good reason to start so slowly, on a modern 8+ thread CPU and SSD?