Seems fairly obvious to me why VS Code would be popular with web devs like myself. It has a built in JS debugger and lots of web-related stuff works out of the

Seems fairly obvious to me why VS Code would be popular with web devs like myself. It has a built in JS debugger and lots of web-related stuff works out of the box (TypeScript, JSX etc). Also the fact it is built in JS means it's easy to extend in JS, so the plugin community is already very healthy. The Vim mode is pretty damn good too (first editor to tempt me away from Vim since I learnt Vim). I don't think there's any astroturfing/fishiness at all. If anything the opposite, they've had to overcome the negative association with MS, and to some small degree Electron. They seem to have done that by 'making a good thing', that everyone who tries is somewhat impressed with. You mention Visual Studio and IntelliJ. Two obvious downsides with those - former is only on Windows, the other is relatively expensive. I tried IntelliJ Webstorm once, seemed good but I never really got a good enough feel for it before my trial ran out, so never tried again shrug.