Geoffrey Huntley writes an extensive explanation on how “Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture” and unburies some (well, expected) shadyness on the part of Microsoft.

The long story short version is summarised at the end:

In short, this is what Microsoft did:

• Created VSCode and made it the best and open-source IDE that everyone would jump to first.
• Make a proprietary free distribution of it, along with proprietary free extensions for the various languages.
• Make those extensions the best version possible and slow down focus on open source ones, often deprecating them.
• Now you have to use the closed form of VSCode to have the best experience by quite a bit.
• Everyone else using VSCode as a platform can’t keep up because Microsoft fractured their community – and your VSCode product is now just an ad for a similar Microsoft product that doesn’t have all the papercuts.