Sorry, first you should consider your language. "Holds no water" is way to strong, especially as it is absolutely wrong. VSCode is nice but a far cry from the abilities of Emacs. And while it does somewhat support a lot of languages, setting it up for a new language is way more work implementing a complex protocol compared to Emacs.
Maybe it has become better, but for a while I looked into it as it was popular for Go editing. Unfortunately, there is way to much predetermined flow built in, so Emacs makes it the way better Go editor for me. Back then, there was even no key binding for compiling the current file.
And as I said, the language coverage is much worse than Emacs, as it is its hackability.
To set the tone of my reply: I’m an every-day-all-day Emacs user. I greatly enjoy configuring my Emacs. Your point about “hackability” is spot on. That being said, I think the language “holds no water” is reasonable here. It sounds like you haven’t used VSCode in a while. (As a lightweight IDE) it has completely seamless integration with every popular language.
Maybe it has become better, but for a while I looked into it as it was popular for Go editing. Unfortunately, there is way to much predetermined flow built in, so Emacs makes it the way better Go editor for me. Back then, there was even no key binding for compiling the current file.
And as I said, the language coverage is much worse than Emacs, as it is its hackability.