This is a rather selective account. Visual Studio 2003-2008 were quite lightweight (even for their time). Visual Studio 2010 was the last one that didn't need gigabytes of ram to use and Visual Studio after 2012 is a horror show.
Visual Studio 2003 (though good luck getting it working) is actually a smaller footprint in memory than other lightweight editors and can normally do more.
There were editors that were fine before VSCode. There was BluFish, Kate, Jedit and those are the ones just off the top of my head. Also Notepad++ is still better than most editors and doesn't need to spawn a node process that slows a i7 machine to a crawl.
As for getting sublime text working, I never had the problems you describe. So Works for me I guess.
The more Visual Studio gets rewritten in .net the slower and more bloated it becomes. Even in 2003 though it's acceptable resource usage was a result of computers improving faster than the VS team could slow things down, in the late 90's it was a very bloated resource hog, the sort that people would upgrade their computers to use.
What's amazing is just how much more bloated it is now compared to the feature set of 20 years ago, there have been very few features added that I care about day to day and even many of them fall into the category of nice to have but not particularly resource intensive.
I'd swap Visual Studio 2010 and 2012. VS2010 is awfully slow even on a modern PC, whereas 2012 is much faster. In a previous job i had both of them installed and for some reason VS2010 had the project association instead of VS2012, leading to cursing and staring at the splash screen while waiting for the system to respond. In contrast VS2012 was MUCH faster.
To me it seemed that after deciding to rewrite the UI in WTF with VS2010 (VS2018 was native MFC) they decided to release it in essentially beta form and then fixed the performance with VS2012.
There were editors that were fine before VSCode. There was BluFish, Kate, Jedit and those are the ones just off the top of my head. Also Notepad++ is still better than most editors and doesn't need to spawn a node process that slows a i7 machine to a crawl.
As for getting sublime text working, I never had the problems you describe. So Works for me I guess.