I would argue that the best thing to come out of VS Code isn't even "VS Code" the overall environment, it's LSP [0], and MS has given that back to the community such that anybody can use it in a competing editor. I don't really think "VS Code" the product has a "moat" here and (up to now, at least) MS hasn't demonstrated much intent on creating one.
On a personal note I've tried using VS Code many times, but although the features look nice, I find the UI too alien. Luckily, vim has plugins to use LSP, so I can have all of the features I want in my existing editor.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft's moats here are things like Teams, Live Share, and Remote. If anyone has or is working on open source implementations that can be installed into the open source version, I'm sure there would be widespread interest.
And yet they failed. Remember Atom[1] or Brackets[2]? I'm sure they are still used by a lot of people. But it was interesting to see Microsoft grow VS Code so fast in popularity. My vague notion is that addressing developer pain points early and providing first party plugins for popular ecosystems gave them an edge.
I don't know if it's possible to get the performance you need to make an IDE/text editor feel snappy in most situations with a pure DOM solution.
Remote development environments are becoming a thing. I've not really had a chance to explore this space a lot but I might.
At GitLab, there are open roles for "Server Runtime" in the incubation engineering team [1] [2] in case someone is interested in joining and building this together :)
[0] https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1400134840754733059
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/#op...
In 10 years Google regret not buying Github.
They regretted it the day it was announced.
The issue is that there’s no money to be made duplicating the effort that has gone into VS Code when VS Code is open source. Even Google doesn’t seem to care about entering that space.