More like a spiritual successor to Atom, at least per the people that started it who came from that project.
Its funny how the same guy who wrote (borderline) the slowest editor, went ahead and built the fastest. Practice makes perfect I guess :)
Atom was based on web tech, like VSCode, while Zed is a native app with a custom GUI framework, just like Sublime Text. And just like ST, the standard option now for a fast barebones text editor. That's what I mean by 'spiritual successor'.
Isn't extensible plugin API part of ST spirit? (so zed can't be a successor until its spirit incorporates a similar one)