I feel like VS Code is in a very weird place right now.

To just be productive, you need a ton of plugins and often enough these don’t really solve all the problems you might have. For example, there’s no “java dev” package, instead you have to install a meta-package plus a bunch of other random crap, half of which don’t really work out of the box. Or, if you want to use the advanced features, you have to live with weird constraints and bugs. The UI isn’t really designed to incorporate more advanced plugins and the plugins themselves often don’t work as expected. For example, for some reason, if you connect to a remote host, the java LSP needs the java home dir to be in the same path on both machines, which is just weird.

For a text editor it’s way too bloated, but for an IDE it’s way to barebones. The days of the nimble and fast advanced editor are gone,

I would see this rather as a starting point, or maybe a collection of pluggable flakes, I’m not sure yet.