I note the conspicuous lack of examples, and it’s irrelevant in this case where they are working to get the changes merged upstream exactly the way, say, Red Ha

I note the conspicuous lack of examples, and it’s irrelevant in this case where they are working to get the changes merged upstream exactly the way, say, Red Hat might have something they work on for a while before it merges upstream. VS Code is the most common example people have, but it’s not the same: that’s always been their project so while I don’t love how some things like Pylance are not open it’s not like those were ever promised as such and the core product runs like a normal corporate open source project. It’s not like they formed Emacs and started breaking compatibility to prevent people from switching back and forth. One key conceptual difference is that code is inherently portable, unlike office documents 30 years ago – if VSC started charging, you could switch to any of dozens of other editors in seconds with no changes to your source code. I would recommend thinking about your comment in the context of the boy who cried wolf. If people trot out EEE every time Microsoft does something in open source, it’s just lowering their credibility among anyone who didn’t say Micro$oft in the 90s and we’ll feel that loss when there’s a real problem.