I actually switched to VS Code vs Sublime for most tasks just recently. It has a few quirks (looking at you, files that just close for no reason) and isn't quite as quick, but the language/debugging packages and support are just leagues better.
My case was also a sqldump, actually. I forget what I eventually did. I think it had to do with hitting Ctrl-C to stop the entire file from loading up front, and only load the page I was looking at.
In retrospect, I do remember also messing around with disabling syntax highlighting and splitting the file up into more manageable chunks that I loaded into separate buffers.
For my purposes, I was trying to delete certain portions of the dump - so vim was the perfect tool to do something like "delete everything from line 850 to the next time this regex is matched", with a minimum of scrolling around and rendering things unnecessarily. iirc, Sublime just locked up and refused to scroll.
I wonder if I could have used Vintage to do what I wanted in Sublime?
vim might very well be if it turns out you had syntax on. I've yet to have vim fail on me as long as I skip the pretty colours for big files. Then again I've had very long lines indeed but can't tell if they were that long.
You wouldn't use VSCode to edit one off files. You'd use VSCode when you want to mount a "project" folder, and then access the files within that.
You "can" open one-off files from the command line. It's just way slower than other methods if you're just doing a quick change, and you'd go mad waiting for the file to open.
"Files that just close": Ironically, VSCode adopted that feature from Sublime, and it works exactly the same. They're "preview" tabs, which you can recognize by the fact that the title is rendered in italics. You can make the tab permanent either by editing the file, or by hitting Cmd-K-E (on macOS, no idea about other OSes).
I actually looked into it a bit more. This may have been the fault of the default "workbench.editor.enablePreviewFromQuickOpen": true, as quick open is literally the only file opening mechanism I use (I assume, if that's cmd+p). Weird default. I turned it to false, maybe that will fix the closing-files issue.
Now if only I can get it to stop automatically closing quotes during comments and ruining my english contractions:
This sounds like a bug or bad setting. I'm able to type contractions in comments in Sublime without it auto inserting a closing quote. Perhaps try reverting to default settings for a moment.
Files that close for no reason is caused by preview mode, which can easily be turned off in the settings.
Otherwise you need to double click or edit the file for it to remain open.