I guess I’ve been programming since I was very young, so I went through a lot of horrible things like frontpage, dreamweaver, notepad++, and then a number of them per language (phpstorm, and other php IDEs, java IDEs, etc.)

The biggest selling point for me for vscode is good defaults (I like vanilla configurations to get started fast on new machines) and discoverability. I want to be able to install 10 plugins and try all of them in a few minutes, and learn shortcuts as I use the plugin (with emacs each extension is an investment)