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As an example:

We have a build for a giant xyz customer system. Every part of the codebase is modern; it has thousands of JUnit5 test cases, 26+ modules. We've set the build up "correctly": following Maven best practices and it turns out, when you follow them, things are really quick with builds just under a few minutes.

Eclipse does an amazing just handling a project this size. It also is able to do things VsCode simply cannot do. We had a enum we needed to move from a submodule to a a global one. Eclipse found all of the references, including ones in our documentation, strings, test cases, and even prop files for runtime config, and refactored the whole thing in a few clicks. We've had the same experience with IntelliJ actually too, where the tools are even more refined.

Eclipse/IntelliJ are on a different plane. VsCode does have it's merits, but it's not really a full blown IDE.

This. I wish more users that prefer quite primitive text editors would broaden their horizons and learn at least one proper IDE. It's been honestly quite funny reading comments for the past few years about how amazing e.g. jump to definition is (compared to grepping and navigating manually) like it's some great new thing when we've had it in every IDE for decades (and much, much more). I remember using autocompletion/jump to definition/various refactorings in Borland IDEs back in 2004, and they were surely available long before then.

The level of code refactoring tools available in IDEA dwarf anything vscode has been able to come up with, and I don't see that changing. And it's not just for Java (although it gets the best tooling), they're the best for every language that has any popularity at all. Including TypeScript, where IDEA has a significantly better performing lsp features than vscode.

For example, it automatically finds copypasted code (including cases where variable names and code structure might differ) and can automatically extract a single implementation and generalize it for you with a single key press. If you have multiple classes with similar interfaces, it can extract the common bits into an interface and update the classes to become its implementations. It can shuffle types and methods around for you, automatically updating references (which you've mentioned). Autocompletion for absolutely everything, including difficult cases like e.g. SQL inside a Rust snippet inside Markdown. And much more.

Exactly^ It’s honestly incredible. I find it hard to switch languages _because_ the tools are so good.

Is there ar particular reason why VSCode does does not perform at these refactoring features? Has it something to do with the underlying technology or did nobody implement it properly yet?

I have never used an IDE more opaque than Eclipse, you can feel the crusty Java code everywhere.

I don't particularly like VSCode, but your criticisms are simply not true (anymore). It has GUI settings, it is pretty stable and you can make things go away.

Intellij, Resharper et al are Java IDEs and they're the best in the business

ReSharper is written in C#, not Java.

Rider has the shared "IDE" part with IntelliJ and others, written in Java, but the back-end and numerous other components are written in C#.

I was speaking about my experience 8 months ago, so... yeah.

> and things are very broken pretty much 100% of the time, or it'll suddenly break when something auto updates. It's also, just obnoxious to use: popups, distractions that never go away, settings are in a schema-less json, and a completely incoherent user experience when you do something as minor as switch plugins

That’s… extremely far from my experience with VSCode, are you sure you’re even talking about VSCode?

I’ve literally never had anything break after an update, not even a plugin. Not saying it doesn’t happen, because it definitely does (every version is followed by 1 or 2 patches in the following days), but it’s usually about pretty niche breakages.

All popups and toasters have a cog wheel on the top right that let you tell them to never show up, if you wish. And to be fair, there are very few, the only ones that come to mind are "oh I know this file type; do you want to install the appropriate extension?", which is honestly a welcome hint (that you can disable globally if you don’t like it).

What you call "distractions that never go away" I’m not sure, because almost everything in the UI can be hidden. What do you think count as a distraction?

Regarding the settings, it’s plain wrong. The settings have had a visual editing interface for years, and the underlying JSON is definitely typed. If you add a key that doesn’t exist, it’ll be greyed out. Invalid values have a red squiggle.

I have no idea what you mean with "incoherent user experience depending on plugins", specifically because the extension API doesn’t let extensions do incoherent stuff.

Yeah, I was lucky that early in my career a swdev turned me onto intellij stuff, it's sometimes second best at stuff and sometimes the bugs are 10 years old with no fixes in sight, but it still feels way better all the time than vscode.