I had to use VS Code it briefly for a class, and was kind of shocked by the telemetry stuff, and that it's just ignore-accepted by both the students and the instructors.

But what turned me off more was this janky feeling around the whole application, something I don't remember experiencing in many other Microsoft tools, such as VB. It feels like it was designed from the code up rather than from the interface down, and everything I do feels like I'm accommodating the program rather than the other way around.

Anyway, the author of this article was right, I still did have it installed in my dev environment, left behind from those classes. I decided to use this opportunity to `pacman --remove code`.

The situation with bad application behaviors being "baked into the code" and propagating to all the "free" distributions is very sad, similar to what's happening with both Chrome and Firefox.

For example, HSTS is now baked into the all the standard distributions and there's absolutely no way (that I've found) to turn it off. I understand the "security" reasons behind it for regular users, but as someone mindful and often completely unable to access a website only because their certificate has expired, I am quite miffed.