I don’t think it was ever intended to be lightweight like Notepad++ given the architectural designs from the outset (LSP, Chromium-base, etc).

It always felt to me more like a desperate attempt by Microsoft to regain the IDE market share as low end FOSS editors started taking over. So MS wanted to appeal to the open source community.

And it worked. Even if the primary build of VSCode which most people run isn’t technically open source.