I wonder if people are actually leaving Jetbrains' products for VS Code, or whether VS Code simply has more new people starting to use it. People who, probably, wouldn't have used IntelliJ anyway (just like many, many people used to use Eclipse – and, likely, many still do).

Looking around me, I see many people who have to work on crappy corporate PCs where management figures VS Code is good enough, and it's free, so why pay for IntelliJ? And since the devs themselves don't seem to complain, they'll just use VS Code.

> Why is VSCode eating their lunch?

- People don't know better. That is, they literally have no idea what a proper IDE is and what it does. Hence all the "VS Code is as good as IDEA" comments

- It's free. People feel entitled to have even the most complex software apps for free.

WebStorm already has quite the hard stand against VS Code. VS Code gets all the plugins for popular frameworks by their respective authors and is free.

Rider is also stuck between a free VS Community version and VS Code which some people successfully use with the C# plugin (although I wouldn't use the latter for large code bases).

> Why is VSCode eating their lunch?

Remote development extension that makes development from remote machines, VMs, docker containers seem like it's your local machine.

I switched from CLion to VSCode for this, even though CLion is generally a nicer IDE for C++. VSCode is also better for memory usage.