publicity and traction over competition by using the open-source label, then silently switching parts of the code out with closed source replacements, and for the most part, dropping any development or contribution to the pre-existing components, practically killing them off (in turn, preventing any floss forks of vscode from using said components, unless they make a commitment to maintain the security, API compatibility, etc, of those components)

for example, Sublime never did that, sublime was closed, and is closed, and will be closed.

They arn't trying to gain traction at the cost of lying in their advertising and labeling, they don't exclusively release closed licensed versions of their "open-source" product like MS does