I just don’t like to use software that isn’t maintained. And I am quite particular of my extensions and do try new ones once in a while. And all interesting Atom extensions are, of course, migrating to VS Code.
And that’s also where the networking comes in: Atom has an extension manager and that does like to pull in arbitrary code from the web.
As for the “Electron abomination” comment. It’s well and good to dislike a technology – I myself think JavaScript is a very bad idea – but that’s pretty much an academic point if all the interesting software uses it. I’d love for some open source dude to write cool software like Atom or Sublime in Python or Go or Rust and license it under a Free Software license. But nobody is doing it. Maybe that new thing from the Atom guy (I think that’s written in Rust) will solve it. But I’m not holding my breath.