1. Raspbian goals seem to be for the OS is to provide an educational platform. I don’t see it as nefarious that they would include VSCode, given they install a number of other components (e.g. matlab) on the basic install. If you don’t need that, they offer the lite version.
2. If you are thinking about playing video you need Rasbian’s closed source drivers and if you are using ffmpeg, you will want their custom build that has hardware acceleration for the pi.
This is not about which software Raspbian includes in their distro. It is about that they have added a third party repo to their distro. So even people who do not use the software are affected.
2. If you are thinking about playing video you need Rasbian’s closed source drivers and if you are using ffmpeg, you will want their custom build that has hardware acceleration for the pi.