You can change size of elements in Emacs too. Hint: 99% of what you're looking at is text, so it boils down to changing font sizes. Emacs already has commands for zooming content in a frame, which work like +/-/0 in a web browser.
Thanks for clarifying something I failed to explain. The relative ease with which I can change the size of most of the elements in Emacs is the reason I didn't switch to, for example, Textmate or to Sublime Text when those editors appeared on my radar.
Emacs, terminal emulators, Plan 9 port, Chrome and apps based on Electron are the only apps on the Mac I have been able to figure out how to change the size of most of the elements of.
"most of": The size of the menu-bar and pop-up menus is fixed in all of those apps when they are running on a Mac, but Apple made the text in them large and legible enough to suit me.
Setting the scaling to a fractional value in System Preferences doesn't count because the result is too blurry. I never obtained a monitor with a horizontal resolution of at least 2560, which is the minimum needed to set the scaling to 2 in System Preferences.
I use emaca and can easily increase the seize of everything. I often do when training other devlopers.
I use a 4k monitor and with a C-x +++ everything is bigger by 3x. I can set it permanently too.
What is vscode doing different?
If I had found a way to change the size of everything on one of the Lua-based editors on the Mac, I probably would've switched years ago to one them. (I don't recall their names.)
If I stay with Emacs it will be because learning how to modify vscode, e.g., by writing my own extension, proved too difficult. (I want my editor to be a general interface to information that is easy for me to modify by writing code.)