If you spend time in their issues, or try to contribute via issues, a pattern emerges; Microsoft as a corp entity has an iron grip on the development and progress. It's open source only in that you can fork freely. UX and DX improvements are routinely shut down by MS employees, MS employees have a deep, deep sense of ownership and tend to respond defensively, repo maintainers are exclusively MS employees (I'm welcome to be wrong here, I couldn't find any that weren't), platitudes are common responses to issues for legitimate improvement, any comparison to Atom or any other editor is summarily shut down after "good faith" discussion, and development and improvements are beholden to the Microsoft development and release cycle.

Now I'll admit I'm fairly cynical wrt VS Code and have a negative view of the team that runs and owns VS Code, and by extension VS Code itself as a product due to the myriad of Microsoft-esc UX and DX forced upon the user. There's a great product in there but Microsoft is a horrible steward.