The important bit here probably has something to do with first party vs third party extensions when talking about the IDE functionality. Also, what's included in the base install is also important if you want to talk about using either as a text editor.
For example, have a look at JetBrains products: https://www.jetbrains.com/products/
Lots of different IDEs (and nowadays other tools too) for different tech stacks, although all of them are based on pretty similar tech/platform. E.g. if you install a few plugins, you can get parts of the WebStorm functionality in PhpStorm or IntelliJ or whatever, even if it might not necessarily be 100% the same. Some other IDEs out there also follow this approach, providing first party support for certain modules, like Eclipse also has similar packages (installable for free in the base product, though) https://www.eclipse.org/jdt/
In contrast VSC has an extension manager that has both first party and third party extensions available and doesn't necessarily pigeonhole you as much towards a particular extension, even though in practice you might still just go for whatever is recommended, which in many cases will be the most popular (and by proxy, most well supported) extension available for whatever it is that you need. However, the downside of this is more fragmentation and having more difficulty in ensuring consistent behaviour, since what's included in IntelliJ and Eclipse JDT is probably a bit better known than what your unique install of VSC will have.
However, at the same time, Eclipse, JetBrains products (all of them) and even other IDEs like NetBeans all fail at the text editor use case. Want to edit an .ini/.env/.yaml/.json file really quickly? Unless you have the IDE already open, the startup will be slow and cumbersome, whereas VSC wins for such use cases hands down. For example, in situations where i have a Git repo with some Ansible scripts, or some GitLab CI stuff for DevOps, i would almost never reach for anything apart from VSC (Notepad++ or other native editors on other platforms are also okay, though VSC is surprisingly consistent most of the time).
Thus, VSC can be a text editor, it can (mostly) be an IDE, though for specific tech stacks and codebases of certain complexity, it will fall behind both VS and JetBrains products, maybe even Eclipse, NetBeans etc. For example, in IntelliJ i can apply a whole plethora of code inspections, there are lots of helpful hints and fix suggestions for popular frameworks (like Spring/Spring Boot/Jakarta) alongside pretty smart autocomplete. Not only that but i can do refactoring across the entire codebase of thousands of files and hundreds of thousands of lines of code with a lot of confidence about the end result. I doubt that i'd be able to work on some of the enterprise stuff that IntelliJ makes easy to reason about in any other editor, at least so successfully - NetBeans straight up crashes when i try to open 30 files and do refactoring, whereas VSC Java plugin felt a tad rudimentary when i last checked (even though that was a while ago).
In summary, it's definitely not just semantics in my view, each tool has its strengths and drawbacks - in practice you might use both for different use cases and have a pleasant time thanks to that.