Oh interesting. This claim makes more sense, but I'm actually surprised by it too - my memory of things is that Sublime Text 2 (released 2012) was one of the most popular editors for scripting languages (JS, PHP, Python, etc.) However, there was a long period of inactivity before Sublime Text 3 was released (2017) with support for Python 3 plugins, and ST was getting stale as Python 2 was slowly phased out.

During that time, Atom was released (2014). But I don't recall it ever being especially popular - at least outside of the JS ecosystem. For one thing, it was kind of slow on release (people still complain about Electron!) and while it offered a lot of customization, these customization often seemed to worsen its performance. It was VS Code that really seemed to draw a wider audience from my perspective.

That said, I switched to vim around the time Atom came out, so I may be out of touch. I doubt there are any solid stats anywhere...