Like @Zippy, I can't imagine what MS stand to gain. They're putting quite a lot of effort into a product that's free, and that is an entrant in a fairly crowded field. One nice thing about VSC is the frequent and, in my experience, issue-free updates.
My impression was that VSC's original target was Typescript development. It's still rather better for that than IntelliJ (though that may be because my copy of IntelliJ is a couple of years old).
Interesting to see that NetBeans is still a thing. In two decades of Java I've only worked at one site where they used it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
