Remote editing back in the 1980s was such a common thing on the Smalltalk and Lisp Machines that all system code was on another machine, more times than not you wouldn't even notice that it was a remote file!
One could do "emoji" just fine as well, and files would have WYSIWYG like look to them using "fat strings" -- that is 1980s technology. There is a dungeon crawler map using that feature to render the map as graphics, it is how you would implement chess pieces, or other "picture" like stuff.
Auto-complete was already standard, similar look up of "who calls" / "who uses" functionality to figure out where things are used, online documentation, etc etc etc...
So all this was perfectly possible, and already used and abused in 1995 -- VSCode isn't doing anything new in that regard.