The only times I’ve had to use Xcode for my flutter app is configuring some things related to signing and distribution. There hasn’t been anything that required Android Studio except for setting up emulators.

I develop an app with flutter on Mac OS. I open xcode when creating a new project to setup signing. I never installed Android studio since I use an Android device for testing and just use the command line tools and SDK (setting this up without android studio was a bit of pain and probably not worth it but still it proves that it's possible).

All development work takes place in VS code, including the incredibly incredibly convenient and performant hot code reload, as well as the final step of "flutter build ios"/"flutter build aab"

It is an experience with very few pain points* and I find it to be very enjoyable.

*except for the random Cocoa Pods error every few months which can be solved by random helpless googling and then deleting the podfile.lock