Speaking for myself, it wasn't a "movement against application bloat" so much as a "frustrated response to these darn bloated applications." There wasn't anything ideological about it, I literally ran out of memory a few times when using VSCode. The important thing is that editing plain text works perfectly well in a terminal, whereas you need a modern GUI for most other business-related software.
I switched to emacs during the pandemic because of Zoom and Slack (along with my horrible browser habits). VSCode is pretty reasonable on resources compared to many Electron apps, and I slightly prefer it to emacs in terms of overall experience. But emacs is also good, and there were just too many Zoom calls where my computer ran out of memory, with VSCode having a glaringly high footprint. I think at the time its terminal emulator was either excessively inefficient, or it had a specific resource leak. So maybe things have gotten better, but I've stuck with emacs regardless.
These days I can let a few dozen unread tabs in Firefox fill in the extra ~1GB of memory VSCode was formerly occupying :)
I switched to emacs during the pandemic because of Zoom and Slack (along with my horrible browser habits). VSCode is pretty reasonable on resources compared to many Electron apps, and I slightly prefer it to emacs in terms of overall experience. But emacs is also good, and there were just too many Zoom calls where my computer ran out of memory, with VSCode having a glaringly high footprint. I think at the time its terminal emulator was either excessively inefficient, or it had a specific resource leak. So maybe things have gotten better, but I've stuck with emacs regardless.
These days I can let a few dozen unread tabs in Firefox fill in the extra ~1GB of memory VSCode was formerly occupying :)