Always felt like Microsoft wants to push me towards their "main" Visual Studio for c++ and .Net by keeping the VSC experience for these languages bad.
For C++ specifically you just need to create a .vscode/c_cpp_properties.json file to tell the intellisense where to find include folders, which defines to assume, and such.
Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code have nothing but two words in common. Dunno why VSC is called that. But on OSX, I just type code on the command line.
The main issue I have so far is remote debugging in gdb appears not to work very well (you can step but you can't use normal gdb commands on the console like you can locally).
Also the autocompletion seems to work only sometimes but that's likely my fault since I haven't actually configured that.
So far, it's working better for me than Sublime did, which was very laggy at times. Both are memory hogs, though.
It is an IDE!
Sure, you don't get the same level of refactoring ability that you would from say, intellij + kotlin, but compiler warning/error integration and going to declaration/definition both work, which is enough for our purposes.
Never used it for C++ though.
Refactoring capabilities are woefully inadequate or just don't work, intellisense is often plain wrong, it doesn't detect when a rebuild or when cmake cache needs to be regenerated often enough, the list goes on and on
https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/
If you're an adventurous person, you can also use their EAP builds for free until the EAP cycle ends: https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/nextversion/
They always say "EAPs are pre-release and may have sharp edges" but TBH I've been choosing the EAPs because they often come with the most features. Only 1 out of every 20 releases has some kind of "wtf" experience