> I don’t understand why anyone would want to miss out on all the automatic inference and interlinked code base, the integrated tooling…

It's almost like you can get that experience with other editors too, not just IDEs :) I'm using vim/neovim and have the same stuff I see others do with IDEs, but I can definitely see why a bunch of people use IDEs anyways, I'm not blind got the fact that other more barebones editors need a bit more fiddling to get to your liking.