Maybe blindingly obvious in hind-sight, but none of the IDEs I mentioned in my last comment have this feature. Nor does any other IDE I've ever used. It's not hard to imagine why a novel feature, without much prior art, potentially sitting on the blocking path for UI rendering, and contributed by an external person would face friction in being merged into core. Not to mention the onboarding complexity of making a change like this in core vs as a standalone extension for a new contributor.

Also, I don't understand at all what your last sentence there means.

> In what world would it be needed to prove the value proposition of "users can see which open brackets are associated with which close brackets"?

One where there is finite time and resources and you have to pick and choose what you tackle. I could easily see this being ignored knowing that VSCode is so extensible and the community could easily pick up the missed non-core functionality until there was time to do it right.

> seems blindingly obvious

Well, for me it IS helpful when the code block doesn't fit on single screen and I have to scroll AND there are multiple levels of brackets. Usually I try to put a cursor and not move it vertically and scroll to see where it ends. And coloring helps here.

Sometimes I want to understand - hey, where is the closing bracket, because there are 3 openings on single line, some expressions formatted on some lines, typecasts and whatnot that litters () around. Format document may not help there to align everything if I got any bracket missing there.

And I usually exit early, trying not to make too nested constructs, not using excess (), prefer constructs that eliminate brackets altogether. Anyways, not always we read our code. Of course python people can laugh that they don't even have such an issue, but others have, you know.