One key thing that VSCode doesn't seem to have is an in-context REPL - what's the right term here? - that lets you run code in the same VM that the text editing stuff is running in, affecting the editor's state by executing the same routines that the editor uses to do things itself. You use this for anything you want, really, from just driving the text editor from code on an ad-hoc basis to writing new extensions interactively.

This really is the main thing that any competitor to Emacs needs to have, in my view, much more so than the prehistoric keybindings, devoted fanbase, wide range of addons, and nasty extension language. (VSCode has 3 out of 4 here anyway.) Without it, VSCode is much more just Visual Studio with Javascript instead of C++.

And a much more modern set of defaults and user affordances.

I'm doing the same! Remote extension or more precisely code-server/Theia as of recent times is an excellent remote workspace environment.

They just added it to a recent release, so you can now add a webview based view to the sidebar or panel [0].

[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_50#_webview-views