Doesn't take away from how awful it is that a corporation usurped the ecosystem like this, but I am not idealistic enough to fight the current.
addendum: it really sucks when a free product that has positioned itself as the defacto product starts to get obnoxious about taking your data (logging in) and charging you for things (Copilot), especially when it's a multinational megacorp who is probably creating and distributing such a product to gain market dominance and crowd out its competitors. (add: this part of the sentence is probably meaner than it needs to be. The people that made VSCode probably wanted to just make a really nice Atom enhancement that worked well with .net. This stuff has been business demands.)
More addendum: If Microsoft didn't want to be pushy about this, they could have included the option in a Version Update announcement on a new tab or something. Wherever release notes and release announcements are normally put.
Lets talk about JetBrains pushing AI as well? Initially it couldn't even be disabled.
I wonder which editor you will learn next, when VSCode falls out of style. I will still be using Emacs.
I use vs code annd jet brains too and it’s fairly straight forward to add in any plugin for this or that. They’re discoverable too. I don’t use a ton but some are helpful.
I also use VSCodium on the desktop simce Atom was abandoned and Vim when editing over ssh. I wanted to like Zed but everything is now infested with AI and the packaging sucks. I just want a nice looking UI desktop editor with Sublime style multiple cursors and without the BS. Git, Copilot etc is deactivated in my VSCode, I don't even use its terminal. But it keeps breaking things or adding crap. Of course, it needs to be open spurce and free. They can charge all they want for plugins and AI which I don't use.
To give some kind of comparison, I love getting lost in C++ documentation and writing complex templates. It's a form of art. But when I want to actually write a program that does something, I do it in python, because it allows me to focus on the problem, rather than the tool.
I don't see this problem being resolved in near future. The core philosophy being vim and Emacs is incompatible with the idea of IDE that "just works".
Have enough muscle memory for several meta commands, and could still write one or two things in ELisp, yet I rather use the "default" IDE and graphical editors than going back to Emacs other than when having to handle a remote session to a Linux machine and the alternative being VI.