If you found that your next door neighbor was sneaking into your house while you're away, and he said "oh I have an option not to do that. Just ask me not to any more." Would that be good enough? You say "ok I would like to invoke that option" and that's it, you happily go away on a month long vacation without installing any cameras or anything because they guy said he won't do that now.
That's a single package, whose setting affects no other apps, and you have to trust that the app even really does what it says, which makes no sense when the topic is apps that may be doing unwanted things behind your back.
I agree with your position but that's a bad analogy (as most analogies are). With your computer you can choose to uninstall and no longer use VSCode. You can't choose your neighbor and you can't force him to move away to prevent his bad actions. Also, it would be more like your neighbor is peeping in your windows or planting a monitoring bug to record your activities, rather than breaking in.
Taking that further, you can ditch your Mac and switch to Linux or BSD if you're concerned about the article subject. In other words, you can sell your house and move if you don't like the direction the neighborhood is going with all the peeping toms about, but there's extra work involved in that solution so you have to decide if you can afford such a change for more privacy. So, you can sell your Mac and move your workflow to a less invasive OS on hardware you choose, but depending on how deep your workflow is intertwined with and relies upon the macOS ecosystem, that can be a ton of work as well.
