I spent time reading through Joel Grus' "I hate notebooks" slide deck and he makes a really compelling why they (Jupyter notebooks) are not the right tool for many reasons.
You have to give credit to JupyterCon for inviting him! Most of his issues relate to Jupyter, he has/had not seen JupyterLab. You can trust that many of these issues will get worked out in the long run. I have nothing against VS Code but Jupyter(Lab) didn't win the ACM Software System award (Nobel price for software) for nothing.
VSCode's magic isn't just the monaco editor, IMO it's really the ecosystem and really nice Intellisense the other extensions provide.
though I do agree, this might be the better solution in the long run.