Comment by matharmin

VSCode semantic highlighting is mentioned by the author, and it does support these type of use cases. It works by first doing normal syntax highlighting, then asynchronously getting the semantic info for semantic highlighting, since it's a much slower process.

The current language-specific implementations do use it to just augment the syntax highlighting, since that is what is what most people would expect. But out of the box it already supports some use cases the author mentioned, such as different highlighting for imports or constants. The full AST and type info can be used for this (depending on the language server), so pretty-much anything is possible.

What I personally find very useful (and had to hack experimental support for) is highlighting of TypeScript async/Promise values and functions. This is something that a language server can identify easier than humans, and can make a big difference in coding.