I switched form VSCode to PHPStorm half a year ago, and while it feels a bit slower, the improvements are so unbelievable worth it for me. It does have a taste for memory, but then again, it easily saves me a lot of time each month, so just throwing RAM at it was a no-brainer for me.
I was relieved when I switched back to PyCharm.
Vscode is nice but still quite far away from some good IDEs.
As to the RAM, it's using around 1.2gb between vs code and the connecting server (WSL2), multiple isntances vary... but with the number of containers and VMs I'm running, I'm generally well over 16gb of use, and I have 64gb on my desktop. So even without VS Code, I have trouble on a 16gb system.
I usually run 3-5 instances for different projects and it'll hover around 3gb RAM, but it appears that they share a lot of memory, closing one or opening an additional project has no visible impact.
I also have to do a lot of context switching (e.g. to review someone else's code), and being able to have a separate set of tabs (even within the same repo) is super-useful for this.
At previous jobs with less separated out code, I have taken this approach (although with Sublime Text rather than VSCode).
I use it daily for .net coding, while i use VS code for everything else.
