[kls]

Two things, integrated and well put together debugger for node and chrome debugging in the IDE would be the first feature for me that stuck out. I am a debugger or REPL forward developer, I like to digest code in small chunks. VS Code has some fairly slick debugging features. Second it's a text editor that acts like and IDE or it's an IDE that acts like an editor, I cannot really decide which it is and I think that is the sweet spot. It also has a huge base of quality plugins for a host of languages.

I am not sold on strong typing for the web and SPA's there is just so much tear down rebuild and remodel that I don't know if the gains are there. Given that I take that view I tend to shun a full and robust IDE in favor of a text editor with language support. VS Code is something a little bit more than that, and I it hits a sweet spot for me. When I have to support our legacy Java apps I jump back to Intellj Idea but it's not my favorite and goes a little too far towards the IDE side.

When I do embedded C, I tend to prefer a full blown IDE as it's just too easy to get lost in the weeds of a large C code base. Which is usually CLion.