VS Code is very* lightweight. Both in speed and in features. Comparing it with IntelliJ makes it seem very basic. Now, for some people that’s okay, but JetBrains IDEs are full-blown IDEs.
*: Compared to something like JetBrains tools, or literally any other electron software.
Although autocomplete is better (especially for pure JS), it doesn't warrant paying for a license IMHO. Personally, I use IDEA for TS because I use it for other languages where it blows everything else out of the water (so muscle memory).
Also, if you're doing server-side development, it has a very good built-in client for two dozen databases (which pretty much replicates the functionality of their DataGrip product), so you get decent data editing / import / export / DDL support, and excellent autocompletion for your SQL (interspersed among TS code, or not — doesn't matter).
Edit: also, 100% of their products' funtionality can be used from keyboard. I don't touch the mouse at all. I think vscode can support something like that, but with very heavy customization (and even then I'm not sure). Out of the box it pretty much forces you to use the mouse for many things.
Incidentally, I use and pay for tabnine (another ai assistant) in emacs and it's fantastic - single line completions are superior to whole snippets I have to read with copilot, and don't get me out of my flow.
I am surprised the tabnine company completions are way easier to work with than in vscode. With grouped backends, company lsp + company tabnine is great. I'd encourage kite users to try it. Well worth the money.
As a student I can use JetBrains tools for free but personally, I'd much rather use something like VSCode combined with clangd than e.g. CLion, as I don't see anything that would make CLion better, while the JetBrains UI is downright cluttered.
As for keyboard use, the command pallete (Ctrl+Shift+P) is right there and should be able to do anything. And thanks to the magic of language servers you can use any editor you like, including (Neo)Vim or Emacs, while keeping most of the capability for language specific stuff.
It does, however, teach junior developers that the autocomplete is unreliable, which is a good thing I guess — I've seen juniors in statically typed languages like Java fail coding interviews because they couldn't remember any of the syntax, the knowledge was contained in the autocomplete and didn't transfer to a whiteboard.
And, maybe you think fixing your IDE yourself makes you a better developer - if you are building IDEs, maybe, sure. I'm more than happy to outsource that a company which does this as its bread and butter.
Microsoft, on the other hand, sells (or tries to) enterprise office solutions. They may have optimized for a single use-case (TypeScript), outside of promoting their web-strategy (typescript), I wouldn't expect them to care one lick about VSCode, once it stops being particularly important.
Its also not open source (VSCode), so I would have no qualms regarding that - there is (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode) OFC but the license for the product everyone uses is not (https://code.visualstudio.com/License/). Similar story for Jetbrains - https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/idea/ is open source while of course IntelliJ, Webstorm are not (https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/idea/)
