I use vscode (primarily because I don’t have sudo rights to install visual studio) and I’ve researched the difference between the two and have never found a more concrete explanation of the differences than a vague “Visual Studio focuses on the entire lifecycle of the software”.

Summary: Visual Studio has 20 years of features. Code has 3.

Those numbers cut both ways, as programming today isn't close to what it was 20 years ago. And choices / features that seemed critical then seem archaic now.

On the other hand, you can't instantly catch up on 20 years worth of good ideas.

I use vscode and visual studio, though I tend to use vscode much less now and tend to use webstorm a lot more.

Visual Studio focuses much more on the environment understanding the language and frameworks you are using it ripples through coding, build system, debugging, and deployment. As such it has multitudes of features that make life easy.

As an analytics architect, VS has SSDT and better support for Azure Data Factory, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, Machine Learning Services in SQL Server, Azure Streaming Analytics, Azure Blob Storage exploration, U-SQL unit testing ...

In my world all VS code is good for is writing Python.

It's a great tool, but there's a lot of legacy left in VS.