Yes and no. An ecosystem can grow, even grow exponentially. But it is sensitive to competitive pressures. VSCode today is so much more widely adopted than anything before it. More than emacs, vim, anything really. So Zed has a good chance because it's simply excellent and many people (myself included) will be motivated to make it happen. But it's not determined that it will succeed in growing a comparable ecosystem.

One thing that works in favour of Zed, which previous IDEs didn't have, is that it's a lot easier to program things today, because of AI. It may even be possible to port many of the more popular extensions from VSCode to Zed with relatively low investment.

I would question that logic and offer the following example: Panic released Nova, a very nice editor that included a JS plugin system to make porting extensions easier. It was not originally (but might be now) set up for easy porting of VSCode extensions.

To date I know of barely anyone using it.

VSCode kind of had Atom’s audience to build off of, and other editors don’t always have that runway.