I suspect VS Code's non-native look has actually contributed to the uptake from a subset of its users. A fullscreen terminal-based editor like Vim is also non-native as far as widget sets are concerned, but pleasantly so in at least one respect. When Chrome was released, when you asked people what they liked about it, sure they'd say it was fast and whatnot, but for a non-trivial segment of the world, they just liked how visually slim it was. They appreciated how little chrome was actually in Chrome. VS Code managed to reap dividends on its imports of the same approach to its "shell", even while not being particularly fast. (People point to VS Code as an example of a snappy Electron app, and they're not wrong insofar as the comparison goes to other typical Electron apps; on an absolute, non-weight-class-adjusted scale, though, VS Code is still pretty clunky—people just ignore it because of how slim it appears in comparison to IDEs like MonoDevelop[1].)
- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Monodevelop-main-window.png