Try Qt themes, they're binaries compiled from C++ code :)

If one can "force uninstall" for safety, then it implies that automatic upgrading an extension with the user's consent is unsafe at the first place.

It is, but that's the reality of today - auto-updates, "evergreen" releases. This was popularised by Chrome, and IMO fixed a LOT of headaches and allowed for much faster and more agile release cycles - the reality before was that a company like Microsoft would have to provide support for older versions of their software for X years and deal with the fallout of security issues with remaining older versions. (Web) developers had to be careful about adopting newer features because X% of their user base would still be on older versions of the runtime, leading to the invention of transpilers and the start of what is still a very complicated system in web front-end world.

It doesn't fix any headaches it just outsources them to the users who get surprise breakages of their workflow in the middle of an important project.

* without the user's consent

yeah. I hope you leave malicious code running on your computers to prove your point.

Isn't the problem that VS Code has no permission model (restricting of them), so all extensions can do anything?

While it is, the same issue exists in Sublime, Vim, Emacs, Gedit, pico/nano[1], IntelliJ, Android Studio, Eclipse, and every editor.

[1] https://threatpost.com/researchers-show-how-popular-text-edi...

I think Xcode may be the exception but Xcode plugins also can’t do much.

I think Emacs and Vim will be lower probability targets than VS Code, though.