Ironically I find using a terminal inside VSCode horrendous. And since most times I need to open 2-3 of them, I have a much better experience with one terminal

Ironically I find using a terminal inside VSCode horrendous. And since most times I need to open 2-3 of them, I have a much better experience with one terminal outside of it, and tmux. And if you haven't tried it, use tmux. It is the geeky tool that unlike vim/emacs you can learn in 60 seconds and immediately adds value. Whereas vim/emacs take longer to learn and get a payoff - I never managed to get to that part of the curve. Add another 5 minutes to set up a tmux script for your development workflow!