The debug integrations in VS Code were what hooked me. Very clean, extensible, and they work. It's certainly what won me over compared to Atom.
Vim/nano/emacs can certainly pull out power, but grokking them on as deep a level as sublime/atom/vscode requires a steep curve (and is complementary anyway).
Something full like VS is too heavy for me personally. I rarely use 80% of the features, and the ones I do want tend to be more complex in the more powerful IDEs when maybe I only need some simple version.
I can certainly imagine a different working environment where I would find the IDE tooling much more valuable, but it's not what I work on now.
VS code being a worse IDE is, for me, a feature.
The simplest response with a similar level of effort is - I disagree with you and find VS Code to be an effective IDE.