Came to say this too... I was really pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get a full dev & build & test environment set up with Visual Studio Code, and how well their little WCH-LinkE debugger works (both SWD and UART in one, Segger could learn from that...).
Now I'm experimenting with their BLE variant, which is a lot more complex, but still simpler than what I'm used to.
