You can increase the speed at which you work with VSCode by limiting the folders that VSCode shows & searches.

Exclude Folders

To exclude folders from showing up add the file globs you like(as shown in the example below)
Open Settings > Text Editor > Files > Files:Exclude

Exclude files/folders from searching.

Open Settings > Text Editor > Features > Search > Search:Exclude

Add as many path/file patterns as you want like for e.g.,

**/node_modules
**/tmp
**.log
**/target

Refer: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/codebasics#_advanced-search-options