Reduced pricing in year 2 and 3, but up front it's $600/year.
And... while someone's base pay may be a lot, these sorts of 'extras' might come from a different budget. And when there are a dozen services you're paying $20-$50/month/seat for, I know some managers start to scrutinize things a bit more. "Can't you just use the free version like other people do?"
I really like the licensing model they employ.
Also I think that it's more like $600/yr for companies.
Not really though. Extensions are frequently deprecated or outdated, need to switch to new alternative, don't play nice together, etc.
Anyway, there's no need to advocate for vscode, it's not an underdog. I imagine everyone here has already formed their opinion and tried JB IDEs, vscode, and other tools, and probably make use of all of them somewhere in their workflow.
Unfortunately my experience differs from yours in this area. It all of course depends on the languages you use, what you do, on which side of adoption curve you are, etc.
I work with .Net plus a plenty of web stuff, I'm rather conservative about plugins. And for me everything is quite stable in my area so that the plugins configured 5 years ago still work. Adoption of language server protocol in different languages and frameworks, adoption of .editorconfig helped a lot to stabilize everything.
VSCode Web as modern version of X Windows based IDEs is great, as yet another Electron app not really.
