This reads like the sort of academic engineering that I hate working around. You ask great questions for research, but the truth of the matter is quite simple.
You can just open both editors next to each other and ask how they are. For me, it's trivial to see that vim is at least an oom faster than VSCode. I don't need to profile or show test coverage. I can just use it and it works. Even if they were about the same speed, the less-than-perfect vim mode implementation always takes too much time out of my editing flow.
Occasionally, an ide will have such a great curated experience that I'll use it for something specific -- but the general case is a no contest for me.
The vimscript implementation doesn't have many of the innovations of modern scripting languages. No JIT, pretenuring, inline caching, etc.
All your "one OOM away from VSCode" scripts run in a script language that is in the slowest category among all programming languages: interpreted languages.
There are probably millions of dollars invested in making scripting languages like JavaScript faster, but that's not the same case for vimscript. Same applies to other languages behind IDEs such as Java. So that intuition is not true.
With hardware accelerated widget toolkits, the TUI advantage is not necessarily true either.
Yeah, I'm not arguing whether that's right or wrong.
It just doesn't matter. Vim is objectively faster. I don't care how many millions of dollars or pl optimizations my editor has. I care how quickly it works.
You can just open both editors next to each other and ask how they are. For me, it's trivial to see that vim is at least an oom faster than VSCode. I don't need to profile or show test coverage. I can just use it and it works. Even if they were about the same speed, the less-than-perfect vim mode implementation always takes too much time out of my editing flow.
Occasionally, an ide will have such a great curated experience that I'll use it for something specific -- but the general case is a no contest for me.