This seems like a complete waste since https://vscode.dev etc exist. Why would anyone want to develop inside of a walled garden?

Microsoft's version does not work on mobile. I have tried many times to make it work on Chrome on Android, but it just isn't designed to work on a small screen and is unusable. It's sad.

When I got out of jail all I had was smartphones I would borrow from friends and the only way I could end up developing sanely was to open a terminal to a Linux box and just use nano instead, which meant no IDE with auto-complete, syntax lookups, formatting and most importantly, debugging.

it's probably not as obvious when you are just out of jail(which is a shame, being locked up should be exactly the time when you can educate yourself, but not in real life probably)

But using linux terminal as devbox doesnt mean you dont have access to modern auto-complete syntax lookups formating etc, there are vim/neovim/emacs with any kind of configurations for all of it, and it can be preconfigured by others with projects like https://github.com/AstroNvim/AstroNvim or https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs

So if you know anyone in the same kind of situation, you can advise them to use that.