Basically we've seen this movie before -look at the trajectory OSX took. As far as I know, it's not really possible to build a useable pure darwin installable OS. Puredarwin itself is stuck in whatever was released in 2018 or earlier.

Like Darwin, there may be an 'open' skeleton that vscode hangs upon, but all of the things that make it useful and attractive are being increasingly pulled behind paywalls.

I'm pretty sure most of us saw this coming a mile away. I've played a little with VS Code here and there but never put a lot of time into it because I'd rather invest my time in things I know will be here in 2035 -like vim/neovim.