This assumes that the entire company is “in on it” when the simplest answer is that the devs who work there wanted something but the core IDE team couldn’t add

This assumes that the entire company is “in on it” when the simplest answer is that the devs who work there wanted something but the core IDE team couldn’t add it directly so told them to make an extension. At least that’s how it usually works when you end up with something like this — I work at Automattic and when we want a new feature on WordPress.com, it usually starts as a plugin that gets activated on every site in a mandatory sort of way.