Vista's annoyance had a purpose, to get program developers to change things to run without escalation. They didn't want you disabling UAC, and these days it breaks things to disable UAC.

By only having an upfront project-wide toggle, VS Code is much worse.

Yeah imagine if at boot Windows Vista gives you the UAC "Do you TRUST all the software you are going to run today?" and if you say yes then it just allows any random code to do whatever it wants.