I am not sure whether my interpretation of REPL driven development is the same, but in VSCode I use "Python Interactive Window" a lot. I can run lines, .py files and cells (lines of code split by "#%%") in an interactive Python shell, and run simple statement directly in the same shell for inspection and debugging. This sounds like a similar featureset as elpy, but of course the exact workflow of elpy in emacs could still be preferable to you and many others.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support-py