* Is this allowed per VS' ToS?

* I wonder if Microsoft intentionally doesn't provide this first party to force everyone to install VS, especially the professional/enterprise versions. One could imagine that we'd have a vsproject.toml file similar to pyproject.toml that just does everything when combined with a minimal command line tool. But that doesn't exist for some reason.

Microsoft doesn't seem to care unless you're a company. That's the reason community edition is free. Individual licenses would be pennies to them, and they gain more than that by having a new person making things in their ecosystem. It's in their interest to make their platform accessible as possible.

Visual Studio does have that functionality, via vsconfig files: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/impor...