Apparently that is indeed what happens, but VS Code still needs to load each active plugin's manifest and prepare hooks for when it'll be loaded. Still nowhere

Apparently that is indeed what happens, but VS Code still needs to load each active plugin's manifest and prepare hooks for when it'll be loaded. Still nowhere as bad as actually loading them all. There are still plenty of other extensions that provide language-specific features that aren't language support, and those will end up getting loaded every time if they aren't deactivated. I find it's still useful to keep those installed and disabled by default, and only enable them for appropriate workspaces. It does help with maintaining Code's great performance.