I don't have a lot of extensions actually, my VS Code is pretty much vanilla.

I'm on the latest version (1.97.2).

I can try the other memory settings indeed, but I think the culprit is the builtin file watcher. I've stumbled across some similar issues on Github, open for 5 years without a solution :(

Isn't IntelliJ IDEA for Java/Kotlin? I have a project which is cross-languages: Go+Rust on the backend, Typescript/React on the frontend, Hurl and Python (Robot Framework) for the test suite. And I'd rather not have one IDE per language (which is IIRC what Jetbrains do).