This is what alienates me when I try to use VSCode every year or two. It has a wonderful extension ecosystem and seems generally quite competent, but there’s no culture of just putting stuff in a text buffer like every other thing. Extensions want their own special windows with different key bindings, the terminal is its own thing, there’s custom UI everywhere. Emacs is just how I think for the most part - here is some text I can freely navigate around and mess with. Sometimes new text is inserted or appended by me or a command, but I’m never having to switch modes in my head.