This statement kind of misses the point: it's not that 'VS Code is an IDE', rather it's that the value of an IDE may not be as much as what some think it is.
I would have made the same conclusion a decade ago, but with sufficient plugin/ability ... I have come to prefer VS Code along with many others and have little reason to go back to using an IDE.
That's not to deny the IDE uses case - for specific kinds of projects it's fine, but there's no doubt VS Code - a non-IDE - is picking up in an a ton of areas wherein traditionally and IDE would have been a first choice.
And like I said it often craps out on autocomplete alone with larger code bases for me (had this happen in Dart and C#)
It's the perfect IDE/editor for JS/Typescript - the rest is subpar.
I use VSCode on a project that's about 3* that right now (not including things like node modules or config) and it's never failed.
Are you sure the problem lies with VSCode rather than the Flutter/Dart plugin?
So in the end the only decent experience I had with it was Typescript and JS.
Compare that to IntelliJ or Visual Studio. If I was mostly doing Web frontend or node I would 100% use vscode. Otherwise I just find it's too unreliable and I don't want to waste productivity energy on it. (I wish it was on IntelliJ level, I would pay for that with vscode remoting possibilities, more than I pay IntelliJ even)
I wonder if that is because VsCode runs on top of Electron
It does work when you needs something light weight - but it often craps out on large projects - ironically it slows down way more than the IDEs. For example I'm writing a Flutter/Dart project ATM - the VS code plugin becomes unusable after a while of working on the project even on a relatively small ~30kloc project. IDEA works just fine and has much better tools.