Before you all fall for the shamless clickbait, no, they haven't yet.

Let instance admins approve or deny the requests then

It's not only VSCode, it's also Github and C# and TypeScript to a lesser extent as well, probably. They want to have control over the "coding" ecosystem. And look at what they already did with github, they trained AI on all projects on it, and they then sell access to that AI.

Unfortunately with vsc you (us) are the product

Getting the little boxes when renaming files. Uuuuuuuuggghhh

COOL K1D 1S TH1S YOU

The Independent Fallout Wiki is a thing. I can't vouch for its value though; I haven't really used it.

No joke there are chatgpt bots going around, even in smaller subreddits.

Installing dependencies automatically mostly

Because they are not active. Some people could make an account and not bother using it, but not that many, that quickly.

Between conservative and newborn paranoid. I use Fedora and Firefox, but (microg) LineageOS and F-Droid on my phone. Also I don't know what half of those apps are but I'd like to use matrix.

It's more like google's style to release a brand new non-standard, insanely difficult to implement "standard" for "the web" which is "vital" for youtube to work. So then your browser is "not supported".