I would be curious what traits separate JetBrains vs VS Code people. Anecdotally, it is people who want a lot of control of their system (VS Code) vs people who do not want to deal with all that crap (JetBrains).
I did try VS Code once, but the lack of autosave annoyed me enough that my trial lasted less than a day. This was admittedly before I knew there was a large ecosystem of extensions and I am sure there is some extension to deal with that problem, but needing to go scavenging for things like that would annoy me.
The 250 bucks is a great deal to not have to deal with things like that.
For me it's just absolutely unthinkable to spend money on software. Everything I've ever needed a computer for is covered with Free Software. Emacs almost does everything I've ever needed, and for IDE stuff it blows everything else out of the water. Never used JetBrains though so I can't compare the two.
I did try VS Code once, but the lack of autosave annoyed me enough that my trial lasted less than a day. This was admittedly before I knew there was a large ecosystem of extensions and I am sure there is some extension to deal with that problem, but needing to go scavenging for things like that would annoy me.
The 250 bucks is a great deal to not have to deal with things like that.