What is a "basic feature" to you is apparently not that to most people, certainly not to me. Just how important could it be to resize the tab height? And what would vertical tabs do that the open editors panel doesn't? I also don't follow regarding the menu bar -- that's the way all apps behave on MacOS? You can put it into fullscreen mode if you want.
It was possible with extensions like titleless and monkey patch, but Microsoft did something recently that made these extensions not work on newer versions.
What annoys me more is that stupid minimap that somehow has become an enabled by default "feature" on modern editors.
VS Code has a vertical documentlist, and if you want different styling, you can build an extension for this. No reason to have a duplicate feature out-of-the-box.
It's so frustrating to yearn for basic features in VSCode only to be ignored for years. For example, on macOS, a good amount of space is wasted because we can't hide the menu/title bar. We can't customize tabs either. No vertical tabs like Edge. No tabs height customization. It's either their way or the highway.
A gripe with Brave: Why doesn't the mouse-over feature for the vertical tabs doesn't work if the cursor is at the very left of the screen? And why can't we move the vertical bar to the right side of screen?