I also don't use VS Code usually. My personal preference is a JetBrains IDE, but my point is more engineers should be able to choose the environment they're most productive in.
If you’re looking to connect via SSH, we do have a workaround here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/blob/main... -- and I use this regularly for Jupyter Notebooks.
At first I liked them because they have lots of great functionalities out of the box, but vscode has caught up and just yesterday I switched back to vscode from jetbrains. For java spring and react
It's pretty configurable. In my experience, it's pretty quick. It's not text editor or VS Code quick but the only thing that ever trips me up is the occasional re-indexing. Well worth it for how well it does everything else.