AFAIU, Sublime Text and Kate (my editor of choice) are pretty similar in spirit, so when I read something nice about ST, I mentally insert "... and Kate". They are both snappy power editors, not IDEs, with LSP support.
Yes, KATE, ST and BBEdit (and VSCode) are "Code aware text editors". I use KATE and BBEdit for smaller project and Go mostly, and use Eclipse for the bigger stuff which needs its own "space" to be developed well and kept organized.
It's a "correct tool for the job at hand" situation for me.
Sublime is one of the tools which really grown and aged well, so it deserves the love it gets.
I personally don't let anybody to tell me which tool to use. It's rude to mock and belittle the tools people use.