Some things are better, some worse. Highlights for unused code or imports is imho worse in vscode/metals and refactoring isn't as easy. But running tests for me has always been much faster. Not sure if you can use bloop with intelij but incremental compilation is much better in vscode.

I've had mixed success with VSCode and JVM related stuff. Although the projects I was working on were using some really obscure Maven stuff and god forbid gradle.