Yup, it’s definitely not a money thing. There’s plenty of tooling I do pay for, but I like hacking on my editor.
Sure, you need to go deep sometimes to tune things how you want, but hey, that’s what we do, right?
The important point is that people have different priorities and will make different trade offs. For me I like lean, fast and hackable. For others it’s that they don’t want to have to understand or configure it. That’s totally fine.
You're right that it's a totally different mindset. I was going to post a comment along the lines of "anytime I need to hack my editor, it's a waste of my time". That's where IntelliJ shines. It's so mature and functional out of the box, that I don't need to hack it. I came from Emacs where, once the initial fun of hacking it wore off, it was just a drag.
I also like that Microsoft has made it incredibly easy to create an extension for VS Code. Most of the functionality usually doesn't even require code, just modifying the package.json file to add UI elements and such.
Sure, you need to go deep sometimes to tune things how you want, but hey, that’s what we do, right?
The important point is that people have different priorities and will make different trade offs. For me I like lean, fast and hackable. For others it’s that they don’t want to have to understand or configure it. That’s totally fine.