They are embracing a lot of technologies because that is how they gain market share and then extinguish them.

and spamming users with ads left and right, Google style, too

Hmm. In Chromium Edge, my new default browser, AFAIK the UO plugin will still work perfectly unlike in Chrome, meaning I rarely if ever see any ads.

The closest thing to an ad in VSCode or for that matter Terminal would be .. I guess hints at ease of Azure cloud services? Never found it intrusive myself, and I do AWS.

It's hard to understand your message, but... ads in VSCode? Is that a thing now?

I was kind of trying to say I haven't seen any ads, just non-intrusive integration with other MS services, in response to the ads reply I got. Sorry that was actually rather vague and roundabout.

You can use VSCodium, it's a fork of VSCode without Microsoft's telemetry.