Edit: most important part. Yes, there is a way. I am in no position to claim to know what is going to help you, but I do know this: there is another way to live. Following is what I have tried and it worked

Been around there, it really is not a good place. Time to look inside. You only have so much time left to live, and only so much energy to do things. As to what can be done, then if possible, take a good break: quit job, buy food, then just stay home. No books, no TV, no speaking to anyone, no internet, no games, no nothing. Your mind will go wild for some time, but then you will recover and see life with more clarity

And for the big picture - look inside. If you were to die today, what would you do? Whom would you speak to one last time? Where would you go if distance was not an issue? What do you want to be done with your dead body? (If the answer is “nothing, I don’t care”, I would strongly suggest go see a doctor. Depression does not just go away)

Also, remember this every day: tomorrow morning, you may not wake up. Today you woke up, but a day will come when you don’t. Remind this to yourself. Slowly this will change your perspective

If you happen to feel like talking - message or ping me, I will answer as fast as I can

Logical and human friendly answer: mutable objects are not a problem, poorly designed code is

Personal rant: why even bother with objects, just use strings, ints, floats, arrays and hashmaps (sarcascm. I have spent hours uncovering logic of large chunks of code with no declaration of what function expects and produces what)

And also, seeing endless create-object-from-data-of-other-object several times has made me want to punch the author of that code in the face. Even bare arrays and hashmaps were less insane than that clusterfuck

I keep hearing about how modal editing is faster

Please, do yourself a favor and ignore that noise. It is more a question of like/dislike and training. Personal sidenote: I daily alternate between PhpStorm and Neovim. Can’t say doing things in either is faster/slower to any significant degree (PhpStorm is mostly there for the things I have not yet configered properly in Neovim, like looking through git history)

and I would like to switch to a more performant editor

This should be looked at and tested objectively: is it working with big files that is the problem? Or navigating the code base? Or something else? Maybe it is better to tweak vscode instead?