Believe them, VS Code is a strange beast in that it's really powerful and has a very flexible extension system... but that's a double edged sword because it lets the devs easily ignore features with the excuse that they should be done with a 3rd party extension.

EDIT - child comment is right, the following paragraph is not true! I was writing from my phone and remembered installing this extension [0] but now that I've checked it is for counting offsets from the beginning of the file, not lines and columns. Which I'd concede is not so much of a basic functionality expected in any editor.

[0]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ramyarao...

  And I mean *really* basic stuff... like a status bar label 
  that shows the line and column numbers where the cursor
  is! Yes, you already need an extension just for that.