

JetBrains ( company behind IntelliJ ) claims soon you can have the best of both worlds - see JetBrains Fleet. With Github co-pilot becoming better every day, and VSC plugins for static code analysis getting better, I would not wonder if in the near feature VSC is as good as WS for tasks like refactoring, autocompletion, etc. VSCode from the other hand starts almost instantly, very handy to quick edit files outside of the project. But it's terrible for quickly open files, quickly bootstrapping projects and a lot of other things.

The refactoring is much easier and once you got better with shortcuts, your productivity can match one of skilled Vim user.

The initial indexing of the directory is painfully slow, also starting up the editor. If you work on single project, WS might be a better option. I've worked with both for quite some time - 2013-2018 primary WebStorm, around 2019 switched to VSCode.
