It's been a long time since I used C, but I wonder whether VSCode really gives a better experience than Emacs. Nowadays you can use Emacs with an LSP server, which is likely also what VSCode is doing. And there are Emacs distributions like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs that take away the configuration pain. As someone who has used Emacs for a very long time, I'd be tempted more into looking at CLion from JetBrains instead.
Regarding the comment about the debugging. For me personally, I always take the time to study the code first before I start debugging. A lot of times I already find the problem by just reading the code and even if that is not the case, I have a much better understanding about how the code is supposed to behave and that makes the debugging session a lot more useful.
And I say that because I have the impression that it is common for developers to dive straight into a debugging session without a good understanding of what the code is doing or trying to do. It's like they see the sympton and want to fix the sympton instead of fixing the core cause.
But that might just be my background with garbage collectors: in that case the sympton only becomes visible a long time after the actual problem occurred. The sympton was often dereferencing a pointer that failed, while the problem was the garbage collector writing a wrong value for that pointer in one of the earlier garbage collections. And that led to a lot of assertions in the code to catch problems early on.