I’m in the camp of those who aren’t waiting until it’s too late and avoid vscode
There are definitely some things that should be focused on privacy, however many modern great products (both hardware and software) got to that state specifically because data was collected and product was refined, all without any evidence of nefarious use.
Personally, I look forward towards the day when I can open up VSCode, type commands in plain English, and it spits out working, correct code.
And I guess if you work on anything open source, leakage of source code isn't a concern anyway.
vi/vim is nice but I find the convenience of VSCode - auto complete, show inf doc etc - very useful
You can have all of that on vim. On neovim, you can even setup LSP with the same LSP servers that VSCode uses [1]. The learning curve is steeper but if you like vim/neovim keyboard-centric features, it is worth it.
The only thing I miss from VSCode is maybe the debugger, not because you can't have one, but because it is a bit tedious to set it up and more error prone. So sometimes I use VSCode as a debugger, but I'm pretty happy with my config on neovim (imports, auto complete, docs info (or "hovering"), definitions, go to definition, rename a symbol, etc., you can have all of that with LSP).
Occasionally also using code-server, I am interested in some workflows that the vscode architecture allows. Not an emacs fanboy, just don’t think I should tie myself too strongly to vscode and found emacs generally better for how my brain functions.