Can someone summarize this in a couple sentences someone who
merely uses VS Code as an IDE would understand?
MS is pushing a change that will break any extensions that were diving into said guts (but also shrink their code a bit).
One such extension was described by its own creator as
> basically a pile of hacks that works by monkey-patching javascript in browser and main processes, which is something that regular extensions can not do, and probably for a good reason :)
-
I clicked on the link fully prepared to be outraged, but I walked away 50/50 on it: it's true that even if you don't officially support a hack, if enough people use said hack, you'll break things for real users when you change stuff that was supposed to be an implementation detail.
I'm guessing this is being done to free them of cases where that was already being worked around internally, and not outright malice judging by the language being used
There are extensions that used some of these private properties to change the UI of the editor, as well as other things I'm sure, and now they won't work since the property names are mangled.
They probably didn't do this to intentionally break those extensions, but it was a side effect.