I dont disagree with anything you said. If I was in their shoes, I would have done exactly the same thing.

Maybe my complaint is that I wish vscode had more features like intellij, or that intellij was the open source baseline a lot of other things could be built on.

Intellij is not without its cruft and problems, dont get me wrong. But its git integration, search, navigation, database tools - I could go on - all of these features are just so much nicer than what vscode offers.