Meh - I used IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code on a daily basis and VSCode is the most responsive environment by far - both in terms of UI responsiveness and operation speed. Now you can argue it's not as fully featured as the mentioned IDEs but it's obviously not just about native vs electron, and electron can provide a good enough experience.
The performance I'm talking about is stuff like code analysis chugging and stalling the editor so I don't understand how your link is contradicting anything from my post.
Lint/hints taking forever to update after code editing, autocomplete popup takes a second to show, etc. This depends on codebase naturally but in my experience for the cases where VS Code works well (mostly typescript) on the same codebase and same PC it's much more responsive than IDEA tools or Visual Studio (and I'm running this on a i9 MBP with 32GB ram so not a weak HW thing).
I type on a 60hz monitor and I'm not particularly sensitive to that kind of latency (this is where I consider VS Code good enough)
The zero latency sounds cool, but there are other issues with the IDE on OSX. There is issue [1] how the UI is repainted on any interaction with the IDE [2]
I'd agree that Swing feels heavy... but Electron feels an order of magnitude heavier.
Though, when done right, it feels fairly close to native. I earn my pay working with IDEA and if you turn off the plugins you don't need its actually quite snappy where you would reasonably expect it to be. I would bet it takes far less optimization to get there than an equivalent Electron application
