> I held out for a year or so after VSCode was released. It felt scummy how MS had swooped in and tried to hijack this new category of editor that GitHub had invented (this was before they'd been acquired, I believe)

Depending on what you consider the "category" to be, Sublime Text (2) was well-established for years before Atom came out, with BBEdit and TextMate before it.

Not to mention Kate, Geany, and the various other "lightweight extensible code editors" that have been out there for years and years.