The issue is one I’ve run across frequently. The problem is that the GUI (Gnome, KDE, etc.) is equivalent to a login shell. In the olden days you logged in on a terminal and that was your environment. Now the GUI performs a login. The shells you run in the terminals have their own environment. X is the underlying graphical environment so you want to modify the environment of your X session. For my Ubuntu the display manager/X session manager reads ~/.profile when you log in. This will also be used by bash when bash is run as a login shell only. I’ve gotten in the habit of setting my path in ~/.profile then putting anything else in the appropriate .zshrc or .bashrc file. The *rc files are read when the shell is interactive. This will make the path available to all apps run in your X session (including Sublime no matter how it’s launched) and includes your shells running in a Terminal.
I know it’s an older thread but this does answer your question of why it’s not working when you modify .bash_profile.