Okay, you are not talking about a problem in principle but how it practically is in reality. I don't know if text editors like Sublime/Atom also have that problem but when it comes to vim I can agree with that. Wouldn't wonder if there are some better external highlighters that can be integrated with vim. I heard that people use a vim plugin for using external linters for static analysis of code and spell checking.

And just to make sure, we agree that adding a feature like AST based highlighting wouldn't make an editor an IDE, right?