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I find VS Code's UI for notebooks to be clunky. Each cell is way too large and it's cluttered with buttons that only show up with mouse-over.

Another issue is if you use vim key maps, Jupyter allows it in editor but vim mapping off automatically in notebooks.

Have you seen Python Interactive? There are no separate editors for each cell, but you edit a single file and use #%% to define the boundaries between cells. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support-py