In fairness, Visual Studio has all of the features of VSCode and many more out of the box too - however, I find myself ducking into VSCode for it's better UI/UX - e.g. JSON/XML formatting, Git source control, code colouring and theming etc.

Visual Studio is not open source. The community edition has T&C unlike IntelliJ community edition. Also IIRC asks you to login with a Microsoft account for sustained usage.

And it is still not good as the equivalent Jetbrains products. Jetbrains products have almost no restrictions either in the free version or in the personally paid versions as far as I remember.

IntelliJ also has a very good git support story, and I find myself using less and less cli git for anything from rebase to selectively staging certain chunks of code.

unfortunately, the API and such for creating an intellij plugin (and creating it well!) is much more difficult than a VScode plugin.

And the structure of VSCode probably makes it easier to write standard code that doesn't perform poorly (it's a browser after all).

Yup, but that is the same as how VSCode makes extending itself more difficult than emacs, but is more full featured and requires less tweaking. They lie on different points of the continuum.

The main missing feature, and the one that enables rich integrations, is a webview.