Oh yeah, registry editing is unambiguously worse.

But I've never used a sophisticated application that does most of its config via registry editing. It's for extreme edge cases only, where it's basically fine - it's a worse about:config, but it serves the same purpose, you only go in there when you already know what you need to do.

vscode, in contrast, puts common things into hand-edited-json-only config. I don't think I've ever had a vscode project that didn't require json changes to work correctly. That's ridiculous.