How often do you really do things like this though? It seems like, sure you can do weird obscure things quicker in Vim, but only if you happen to remember how do to the weird obscure things, and it's only useful in weird obscure situations.
For 99% of tasks the built-in VSCode stuff does the job for me. Ctrl-D especially.
All the time. Some examples:
* ct, : "change up to comma", useful for replacing a function argument.
* ya" : "yank around '"'", copy the string literal the cursor is currently inside.
* ci( : "change inside '('", useful for changing the condition in an "if" statement.
* da{ : "delete (i.e. cut) '{'-delimited block", useful when changing the structure of if/else blocks.
I agree that these commands may sound obscure, and many Vim users use the program for a long time without using them (I certainly did). But when you start using them, you find that these composable editing commands correspond really well to many of the logical editing actions you perform.