The Sublime Text 4 dev builds pulled me enthusiastically back to Sublime full-time, and I'm excited that it's close to release. It's been carefully modernized and is a joy to use. In particular, writing Go in Sublime with LSP (gopls) and Sublime's Go Build System plugin essentially makes it an IDE for me, but still as snappy as, well, Sublime. That's a hard combination to beat. I suspect Sublime's approach of "do one thing well" (text editing) is especially well-suited for a language like Go, which has such an excellent selection of first-party tools. Sublime's approach lets those tools shine rather than hiding them away.
It's hard to name all of the features that feel fast. Some are little, like scrolling; many are bigger, like starting up the editor, switching projects, and searching for symbols, all of which are instantaneous. Even the dev builds have been remarkably stable; the result of the care taken is that the whole application feels crafted. It's a quality that HN (rightly!) laments is lacking in much modern software.
There are caveats; in particular, to get gopls to work, I recall having to search around a plugin's GitHub issues to find a solution for some problem with my $PATH. Not everyone will want this upfront learning investment. For me, the tradeoff was worth it. Having gotten familiar with the Sublime console and just a bit of how its plugin system works, there are no longer any parts of my editor I'm scared of and consider a black box.
Finally, I am happy that I paid for Sublime; I own my copy. The VSCode community seems vibrant and sustainable, but when trying it, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was living in Microsoft's world. They've shepherded it well so far, and it would seem they have incentive to continue. But despite being OSS, I never felt it was mine. One modicum of validation to that feeling: Microsoft recently (last year?) switched to a closed-source model for the Python language server that made the VSCode python experience so great for me. So overall, the transaction with Sublime HQ felt clearer to me. I paid them money for a great editor, rather than using an editor for free in exchange for goodwill or developer mindshare. That is a transaction I'd make again.