> I thought it was weird when Jetbrains started to split up their product into language-specific products
They're for different audiences; the hurdle of trying to explain to a JS dev "yeah, I know when it starts up it asks for a Maven/Gradle/JVM, but just ignore that and open a directory after you install the following 8 plugins" is bad DX. As others have said, the standalone products are not feature parity with the IJ plugins. I have no idea why that is, or what incentives are driving that, but for the time being it is what it is
They're for different audiences; the hurdle of trying to explain to a JS dev "yeah, I know when it starts up it asks for a Maven/Gradle/JVM, but just ignore that and open a directory after you install the following 8 plugins" is bad DX. As others have said, the standalone products are not feature parity with the IJ plugins. I have no idea why that is, or what incentives are driving that, but for the time being it is what it is