I use Atom and Platformio exclusively for Arduino projects - for both AVR & Expressif processors. I like the environment much better than Arduino IDE and I no longer get whiplash from trying to keep up with the IDE du jour.
However, from what I've seen, it appears that the Debugger support is better with the VSCode framework rather than Atom. I don't use the Debugger (yet), but probably will when I start including the Arm processors in the mix.
Tom