I paid for Sublime, but moved to VSCode because at least at the time it had better hassle free support for more languages. Including linters, auto formatting and just generally convenient stuff.
I‘m not sure where it stands now. My guess is that Sublime has caught up for mainstream languages, but the support for languages that are a bit more niche like Clojure or Zig is nowhere near as good.
I miss the speed and editing experience of Sublime though.
I was the same as you but in the end I returned to Sublime. Nowadays with LSP plugin you don't need much, just LSP + extension to support your language and that's about it.
They changed the licenses to 3 year from lifetime though, so it's a bit of a bummer but at the same time I get it.
I‘m not sure where it stands now. My guess is that Sublime has caught up for mainstream languages, but the support for languages that are a bit more niche like Clojure or Zig is nowhere near as good.
I miss the speed and editing experience of Sublime though.