I think that the loading speed is really a technical achievement. I don’t even know how it’s possible when just executing a git clone of a repository can take upwards of 10 times longer than what this website is capable of. Let alone the rest of the work of getting those files into the vscode editor. Even if he just pointed it at GitHub- GitHub itself loads slower than this!
On the other hand, I agree that a lot of people seem to think that OP has recreated vscode from scratch, which seems to have led to a lot of over the top praise. “Obviously” this is just an embed of the Monaco editor, which is still very cool mind you, but not a towering UX achievement or anything.
If you open your browser's network panel, you can see the secret sauce here: GitHub's API. Each time you open a file, the UI makes a request to GitHub's API for the content. That's why it's dramatically faster than cloning a repo; instead of pulling the entire history of the repo upfront, it dynamically requests only the files viewed.
On the other hand, I agree that a lot of people seem to think that OP has recreated vscode from scratch, which seems to have led to a lot of over the top praise. “Obviously” this is just an embed of the Monaco editor, which is still very cool mind you, but not a towering UX achievement or anything.