For me the advantage of VSCode is in its approach and how it has differed from other products:

- VSCode Remoting is really useful. It doesn’t suffer as much from latency as SSH or display forwarding, and lets you use some local configuration when remoting. Neovim will soon have a feature like this.

- Language servers for code intelligence has greatly improved editor support for languages. Up until the introduction and adoption of LSP, which was practically an invention of VSCode, language support was significantly more hit-or-miss with most editors. Basically only IntelliJ IDEA could do similar code intelligence across many languages. Because of LSP though, more editors and more languages can participate in inline documentation, go to symbol, errors as you type, debugging, etc. for example, many people now use language servers with Vim, and you can see useful integrations for languages like Terraform/Hashicorp HCL.

- The extensions ecosystem: it isn’t necessarily the greatest ever, but it is very solid.

- Compared to many IDEs, it remains lightweight and fast to boot. Though I’m not complaining, (regular) Visual Studio and IntelliJ are too useful to ignore in some cases.

- Unification: because it’s so versatile, across OSes, across runtimes, over remoting, over Code Spaces, you can buy into the ecosystem in your projects. You can tell Code Spaces what extensions to install and what commands to run, to try to build a nice environment. You can tell desktop VS Code what extensions are recommended, add workspace configuration to help improve the workflow. Users still can use other editors, and you can still include editor information for those editors too. But, for someone who just wants a good option to edit a specific project, pushing them towards VS Code is a really safe bet.

To be clear it has some issues too:

- There is no equally useable OSS version, as the Microsoft distribution has become more dependent on services and blobs.

- It’s not as quick and responsive as something like Sublime Text or vim.

… but honestly, I think it’s just great. If I was a new programmer again and I could jump right into projects and immediately begin working on them without having to figure out the rigmarole of version control, tool chains, build system and editor config, that would be amazing. For that reason I think Code Spaces and VSCode are net goods, though I think we ought not become too dependent on the specific solution. VSCode is never going to be the perfect editor for any specific use, but I believe overall it is usually a great editor.