I think you're making the point that a majority of VS Code was funded by Microsoft, and therefore it can't be compared to Emacs which was either mostly or entirely coded by volunteers?

The vast majority of Emacs's usefulness is its ecosystem. Several Emacs clones have been made in a very small amount of time, but none have caught on because they lack the ecosystem and community. So it's only really fair to compare VS Code's ecosystem with Emacs's ecosystem. And VS Code's ecosystem was created by unpaid volunteers too.