Not sure what you consider "no good" alternatives. jeanp413.open-remote-ssh[0] has worked flawlessly. It's the first or second search hit in the extension manager for "ssh". It's a fork of Microsoft's previous extension before the proprietarized it.
I very much dislike this extension because it uses a built-in ssh client that is far from feature complete and does a lot of reinventing the wheel. Microsoft's extension uses the system ssh binary, as does https://open-vsx.org/extension/aergic/zygos-vscodium which I much prefer. After discovering the latter, I uninstalled VSCode and have fully moved to VSCodium.
In practice, if I don't use the terminal from inside the editor, what are the advantages of this extension compared to the other one?
Security of using a battle tested ssh binary vs whatever random javascript library is being used.