The page says you need to install a compiler. The debugging page says GDB. It doesn't ship with these does it? That's all I'm saying.
A lot of the tooling options with VS are getting better month over month even. There's a reason why a fair number of developers for Go, Rust, TypeScript and other languages are absolutely preferring VS Code over other options...
(You do still have to separately install Docker. I guess this is because Docker puts a lot of global state on the machine, so having VSCode try to manage a separate copy of it would cause too many problems.)
The terminal used with VS Code (and Hyper) needs a bit of work though... it gets wonky now and then, good enough most of the time, until it isn't.
I use it often. It doesn't do profiling but building and debugging works fine (though I still prefer VS proper).
I use VS on Windows, VS Code on Mac for the same code base. I have for decades in the former and years in the latter (finally ditching XCode might have been one of the best decisions I've ever made with regard to my tooling).