I get that. For me VSCode is pretty clunky in terms of replacing what I like about Emacs. Writing a plugin is way more of an exercise than writing a couple line

I get that. For me VSCode is pretty clunky in terms of replacing what I like about Emacs. Writing a plugin is way more of an exercise than writing a couple lines of elisp to change something or add some new functionality, things are not self-documenting, it's not nearly as easy to open a REPL and start poking around programmatically at open files, etc. These are the things that I value with Emacs and that make me more productive.