One question bugs me: how the hell did VSCode developers manage to get so incredibly much better performance (both low memory usage and responsiveness), using such a similar technical platform (also Node/js/Electron)?!
There are surely lots of tricks to be learned from such a comparison, so if someone would dissect and compare Atom vs VSCode I'd even pay to read such an article!
Discord too. A lot of people elsewhere in this thread are talking about how Slack is eating a ton of RAM and things like that, but (anecdotally, of course) Discord seems to be a lot better while using a lot less RAM. Personally, I can be in ~80 Discord "servers" that total to a few hundred thousand people and it's still using <500MB of RAM, so clearly it's possible to do a good job of resource management.
There are surely lots of tricks to be learned from such a comparison, so if someone would dissect and compare Atom vs VSCode I'd even pay to read such an article!