It's entirely gatekeepy. We should be doing everything we can to encourage development where people are at, not trying to say that unless you do it a certain way (which costs a lot of money for a student, or someone in a developing country) you're not a "decent developer".

Plus there are more than enough "dark matter" developers making an otherwise good living at Fortune Xty companies that are afraid of technology and love micro-management and require all software to install to go through 6 month+ review processes. I've known some fantastic developers that will put up with that (and more), code in Notepad and Perforce if they have to, so long as they make a living wage and can clock out directly at 4:59pm every day. (In some of those cases there is maybe hope for them that getting a personal internet access firewall exception for vscode.dev might only be one form and a 30 minute review versus that 6 month+ process to get VS Code installed properly. I appreciate that it may be a nice new option for them by existing.)

It's not a lifestyle that I want for myself, but that doesn't mean I don't respect those folks as "decent developers". It takes a lot of fortitude to build software in those sorts of constraints.

It may be late in October, but I guess some people don't appreciate horror stories of actual development jobs that exist. If I could find a way to package that and sell it as Developer Haunted House experiences, I imagine I could make a quick buck.