it's a problem. As soon as it became easy to ask for money via Patreon or githib sponsorship, etc... tons of people are going to try to get some for minimal effort. It's just the nature of the beast.
Asking for money isn’t a problem. The problem is this person went out of their way to extract money by harassing people who rightfully use the open source Apache 2 version, switching the marketplace extension to a closed source version with obfuscated code (likely malicious according to MS), and possibly more, all this for doing a quite small amount of work. That’s after already raising $7.6k, apparently.
Making a theme is not minimal effort which is why 99.9999% of everyone uses preexisting themes rather than making their own.
LoC is a red herring. And the fact that thousands of people decided to introduce his LoC as a dependency in their local development environment makes the point.
I'm surprised to see supposed software engineers get this wrong. We tend to dismiss look&feel type things as low effort which is funny because very few of us could make a make a good theme if we tried, yet it's "just" a matter of picking colors.
Maintaining a theme ~a decade after its creation is minimal effort. You can check the commit history yourself and see it's a one line change once in a while among auto dependency bumps thanks to a >10k line package-lock.json, at least half of which is unrelated to core functionality as demonstrated by t3dotgg.
It's also funny to see a "supposed software engineer" shit on other's tools and post veiled personal attacks based on a single Internet comment. If I were you I'd probably insinuate you've never worked on any large code base so don't know LoC definitely correlates with complexity as a rough first signal (not to mention I included a rough analysis of actual code as well), but I shouldn't do that based on a single comment. Anyway I've maintained plenty of open source code bases large and small, popular (>10k stars, yes that's not a very good metric but it's also a useful first signal) or not, so I'm pretty well equipped to evaluate maintenance burden.
Almost all of the work has already been done by other people for other text editors. Porting a theme requires copying files from another project and writing a tiny bit of glue around it. The author of a niche terminal emulator I'm using on small systems was able to add around a hundred themes this way in a short amount of time. Sadly, he wasn't able to raise $7.6k×100 for all that thankless work.
I think effort is irrelevant. Value is what we really look at when deciding what price to pay. It doesn't matter to most people if it took someone a 1000 hours to produce a loaf of bread. They're not going to pay 100x the price of the bread that took 10 hours to produce. Especially, if the products are mostly indistinguishable.
I think the luxury market proves my point. The perceived value of luxury items is much higher as reflected in the price paid. Although, the cost and effort to produce luxury items is roughly the same as a similar non luxury item.