I would say there’s a difference between cognitive load and visual clutter. One of the problems I have with the visual studio UI is that it tries to be everyone

I would say there’s a difference between cognitive load and visual clutter. One of the problems I have with the visual studio UI is that it tries to be everyone’s everything…all at once. I much prefer the searchable command bar in VSCode because everything I need is just a hot key and a couple key strokes away but when I’m just using the editor I don’t have to sacrifice space or deal with sifting through icons to get to the only ones I need 90% of the time. That being said presumably the features are still there just hidden under a menu item or something. Ultimately it comes down to personal preference but I’ve basically gotten to the point where when I’m actually writing code I use VSCode and when I need access to more advanced tooling, or have to deal with some of our legacy build systems, I pop into visual studio proper. I think I’m just a bit more use to some of that dev tooling being outside of the editor but I would really love some bigger investments in the .NET dev tooling in VSCode and the .NET CLI so I can have an editor that’s just an editor most of the time and still be able to take advantage of the great debugger and everything else VS provides.