This made me think that VS Code should really just have a "View Github Repository" option where you paste the URL and it opens something like this, except in the normal desktop app. If you want to be elaborate you could even have support for making changes.
If you have the Visual Studio Codespaces extension installed (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vsonl...), then GitHub Codespaces (https://github.com/features/codespaces currently in beta) gets you a workflow pretty close to this.