Among developers, probably the most popular text editors are VSCode, vim, and emacs.

On a spectrum of "notepad to IDE", vim is closest to "editor only"; although with effort it's possible to get an environment with nice bells & whistles.

Emacs has always been 'heavier' than vim (although I don't think it's "works well out of the box enough" to count as an 'IDE'). A couple of ways in which it's heavier is e.g. its fancy UI for customising properties; or its "apps" like org-mode or magit, or having an elisp shell or support for virtual terminals.

VSCode's also not quite an 'IDE'. But it's also heavier than just a pure 'editor'.

VSCode doesn't quite have the insane level of customisability that Emacs has. VSCode also doesn't have people bragging about e.g. reading email from VSCode. -- But, VSCode does have some of these features (e.g. an 'app' for interacting with Git, or inbuilt terminal).

I like to think that VSCode's discoverability owes a bit to Emacs (e.g. the key bindings showing in the command palette reminds me of emacs' which-key).

Thank you. I thought you were getting at some kind of fundamental alignment between the two products, but as I see it, you view VS Code as a product it’s as extensible as Emacs, or something close