But… Isn’t that kind of the point? Slashing computational cost so that we can deploy that stuff wherever it’s needed without a tenfold increase in the world’s energy bill?

Whether we should do that at all is a very different question.

You can get e.g. pylance to work if you trick it:

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/1640

So, at least in that instance, it’s just Microsoft being a little petty.

You think that’s a lot? I don’t have a single laptop younger than 6 years, at home or work.