“What many people don't know is that we decided to not use any UI frameworks from the beginning and that is still true today because performance is very important to us and we want to be fully in control of our own destiny. So we don't want to chase a framework or track some performance in the framework. We want to be directly as close to the DOM as possible.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnKzJRr-rd0

VS Code is one of the best built apps out there and it's surprising they did it all in Electron. I guess direct DOM manipulation makes sense since VS Code really does run significantly faster than other code editors like Atom