I’ve been using JupyterLab for the past couple years and tried VS Code two or three months ago and it was not a smooth experience. I regularly use VS Code for my non data science coding, but VS Code notebooks were much slower than JupyterLab and they would often hang, requiring me to kill the kernel and VS Code. Switched back to JupyterLab and had zero problems.
You should give it a spin again. Notebooks _used_ to be a web view in VS Code. But we re-wrote them to use native UI elements and the performance is much better.
