The tooling argument is contradicting itself: You need a big fat IDE to work with c#. Profiling is not even part of the default tooling, Microsoft tutorials want you to upload profiles to external flamegraph tools etc.
Btw, I learned writing C# with vim back in 2008 on Mono. You don't need any IDE at all to do anything with C#, all compilation etc. can also be done by invoking the compiler or build system and editing project config files any your editor of choice.
Depends on what you do.
For backend APIs I thought I'd need Rider (I'm on macOS) but I've been happy using VSCode.
I suppose for MAUI or Windows desktop it's different though.
This is completely false.
On a Mac:
brew install --cask visual-studio-code
brew install dotnet
That's all you need to get a language server, a debugger and the full SDK. It can rename symbols, step into implementations, apply standard refactorings, etc.
For profiling there are dotnet-trace, dotnet-metrics and various utilities to visualize the traces. You can even wire all that to pprof on Linux.
JetBrains tools are very nice but they are by no means a requirement.
You don't need an IDE for C# any more than you do for any other language. You can use literally any form of text editing. We use IDEs because they make the job easier.
Edit: Oops, I'm wrong. I saw visual-studio-code but read visual-studio.
Nonsense, VS Code, Helix, NeoVim all support C# fine, e.g.