I was watching the "Simple Made Easy" talk by Rick Hickey, and while he was talking more about programming languages, the talk could extend easily to editors and other type of tooling. People are always going for easy, not simple.

Vim is very simple (a composable language for editing, straightforward integration with cli tools, easily extendable,...). Emacs is simple (Major mode that dictates main operations and display, minor modes for additional features, integrations between them can be described more as a complex web than a simple graph...).

VS Code is easy (helpful suggestion for plugins, Familiar IDE-like interface, default setup, ready to hack on projects,...), but scratch that surface and the complexity appears (behemoth web engine, settings all over the place, app store like marketplace, extension are full blown software project,...). All the cons of IDE with none of the pros.

People will opt for what's accessible. Vim requires you to learn an alien control scheme to even navigate through code, and Emacs requires you to learn an incredibly unique programming language — one that sees no real world use, let's be honest — for basic tasks. Is it any surprise, then, that Microsoft had no issue swooping in and dominating the editor market when Emacs and Vim users believe that these are "features"?

VSCode does a great job keeping the complexity away from the user. Vim and Emacs shove it in your face. I prefer VSCode's approach.

"Not broken" trumps both simple and easy.

Syntax highlighting on the open source editors was a pile of regex fail before VSCode came along and forced everybody into the LSP.