May I ask how you feel about editors like vim/neovim or emacs or helix? I find that the best editing experience is one you can easily customize to support your needs, for me that is neovim but for you it could be something outside of VS Code?

Also shocked to learn VS Code is using textmate instead of treesitter.

I "learned" vim and used to spend time on setting up a vim environment. But it took way too much time to customize these things. Plus installing plugins is nowhere as easy as with vscode.

These days I just use vim plugin in VSCode and I'm very happy about the setup.

P.S. I am also an experienced VSCode extension developer. You just get much more exposure with a vscode extension compared to vim -- that's where everybody is. And of course it makes sense for me to dogfood the extension.

They probably see Cursor as a threat and are trying hard to keep up and avoid losing market share.