It’s clumsy as hell. It’s neither a good editor, which focus on being fast when doing things with text, nor a good IDE, which is more about the tooling and getting a project done. It’s trying to be both at the same time. And the result is bad at both.
I have nothing against VSCode but I don’t use it.
For small files and quick edits i use neovim with no customisation at all. Back when I first started using vim I had a pretty long config and some plugins installed and so on. But now that I no longer try to use it as an IDE, neovim is perfect for small edits.
For development work I use JetBrains suite of tools. Very minimal amount of customisation there also, only a couple of extra plugins installed by me and a couple of changes in the settings. It works well enough that I don’t have any desire to spend time customising it a whole bunch.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved neovim and other tools but tbh I just nano for simple edits now. AI tab complete is just too good. Basically it’s barebones or VSCode (or its variants). I could probably use vanilla neovim instead of nano but I've not used vim all that much recently to be in that "flow".
I'd waste time with tools. I have my vim config, my git config, my emacs config, my bash config,... that I copy over to any development environment I have. And every now and then, I go into the manual or other people config to check if there's any new trick I can apply.
Comfort is something invaluable when doing a task. I can accept discomfort when I'm in an unfamiliar environment, but not when it's going to be something I will be in for days.
I don’t know, others might be better out of the box. But once you start adding features they all become a mess. I rather just deal with a known mess and not waste time with tools.