> starting vscode again takes about a second, and then maybe 10s of seconds of background processing

Yet I'm doing the same thing instantly or near instantly.

I don't reboot often and I'm still lazy and will leave projects open often, but honestly, have you considered that your workflow is an adaptation to the wait time?

  > Navigating between files (using fuzzy search or go-to-definition) is just a lot faster and more convenient.

I agree? But why do you think people don't fuzzy search in vim? Or the terminal? There's been tools to do this for a very long time. Fzf is over a decade old and wasn't the first