FWIW, I have been doing Windows development on and off since the 90s, and not only have their free tools have always been extremely capable, you can get third party and open sources tooling for literally everything... with Chrome having finally ditched msvc a few years ago for clang, I feel like there is really no excuse anymore for feeling stuck with Microsoft's tooling.

The issue with macOS development is that there are simple things you pretty much have to do for even the most basic app to work correctly--such as build the menu bar from a nib or bundle icons--that require you to use closed source software like altool and ibtool that come with Xcode (and then, despite being command line tools, for some incompetent reason tend to be tied very tightly to the current version of the operating system, which makes stuff like CI extremely annoying).

Yeah, when one likes to only do low level C and C++ Win32 code, with crutches for everything else.

I mean, I feel like you are treating something I consider "amateur hour development" as "the only reasonable way to do things"; but, even so: you seem to be missing that on macOS it is nigh into impossible to opt out of sitting on a Mac using sad software that comes with Xcode, whereas even C++/WinRT (which you mention, but which I would still mostly consider "low level") is something I can easily use with an alternative IDE from a different operating system. The only place where I feel like you will be sad with Windows development sitting on a drastically different stack is dealing with the more cutting edge .NET functionality. On macOS, it is like pulling teeth to get even a hello world app working without Xcode. Alternative stack tooling like Flutter from giant companies like Google still is forced through Xcode workflows.

I would like to see you use Visual Studio plugins (C++/WinRT is one), or do ETW monitoring, or Event Viewer plugins from Linux.

So many examples that are beyond bare bones Win32 C calls.

There are certainly features in VS that are not in VS code (otherwise the install size of what 20x? would be pretty crazy). Tools like profilers for example. Visual designers are also among them but are not a requirement. I develop both WPF and WinForms and don’t use designers even though I have had VS enterprise for the last 20 years.. so the question is “can you do it” and “do they have the same feature set” which are obviously two separate questions. There are features available in vscode that aren’t available in VS too.

Which is reasonable. If you can afford 5 fulltime employees you can afford visual studio or take the plunge and move fully to vscode.