Should I have to upgrade my CPU to get acceptable performance out of a TEXT editor?
Well a modern editor is more akin to an exobrain than a simple text editor.
Anyway recent intellij is pretty fast, also it is more memory bound than cpu bound.
Yes. It's way cheaper. You can get a new CPU for $200, but you can't rewrite VSCode in the time that money would provide.
Why is the only other option to rewrite VSCode? How about another editor? Vim, <space, doom, etc>emacs...?
Okay then replace "rewrite VSCode" with "turn Vim/Emacs into the same IDE experience as VSCode/IntelliJ".