I’m not appalled by it because the resource use is “free.”

I already have 32GB of RAM plus an M2 Max in my laptop because my company issued it to me. I already have 32GB of RAM and a 9850X3D in my desktop because I play games.

What non-ideological motivation do I have to ration computing resources on my IDE? Even if I had an 8GB MacBook Neo, VSCode would run fine.

If I was coding on a raspberry pi my story would change (although I suspect VSCode would run fine on that, too), but I’m not so I don’t care. It’s fast enough to get the job done and the rich featureset is more important than raw performance.