Modernizing the VS Code UI

It's perhaps a good time to bring attention to this open issue [1] on vscode from 2015 with thousands of upvotes, hundreds of comments pleading, the collective hive mind losing their minds over how a usability requirement so basic can be left neglected for years altogether even as so many other not so requested features seem to have no problem getting piled on.

While this issue has been a personal pain point, I do recall there were quite a few widely requested usability issues that went unaddressed over the years. So I'm not sure about how to react when I read this blog post about "modernizing" vscode UI in 2026. How can you talk about modernizing and journey through a 5-stage evolution when fundamental aspects are so obviously unaddressed? What is a modern UI anyways and how is it better than ancient UI? What specific advancements in HCI research from the last 10 years are being incorporated here to call the UI modernized?

I have to take a dig at the larger design community because I think this is not an isolated problem. Software usability in general has been going down for me over the years. There was a time when you would hear more from the community about the science of interaction and why you would design an interface in a certain way. Of late I feel the emphasis shifting more towards visual design with things like colors, spacing, border radii etc. with this blog post being a case in point.

If HN were to be launched today, I'm sure it would look nothing like what it does and instead have a more "modern" UI. But, would it be an improvement?

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/519