JetBrains isn’t “very expensive”: for one thing, there’s a free and open source community edition; for another, the IntelliJ license is about the same as a Netflix subscription and, rather than being a pure cost, it’s a tool that supports one’s valuable skills.
The community edition only supports Java-style languages (and python with the PyCharm version). It's no match for the huge breadth of free vscode plugins.
And it's very hard to compete with free. You really have to code a lot to make it worth it. Personally I don't usually have a Netflix subscription because of the price though I'd sometimes get it for a month or so to watch something particular.
And for work purposes it's the difference of just being able to start using it versus justifying the expense to multiple levels in the org which can be prohibitive.
I totally understand how VS Code took fight like it did with its free model.
