This is rather scary and disheartening. I finally switched from 12+ years of Eclipse to vscode just last year. After a disproportionate amount of hand wringing and testing. I'd rather move houses twice before moving to a new IDE. But it's true that since running VSCode I feel less like I actually own my environment. I would never rent an IDE or do my work in the cloud, just on basic principle. I really like VS now that I've wrangled it, though, and I'm hoping to not have to bail and find a new platform in the next 10 years or so.
The Codium build mentioned in OP is fully free. You don't have to use the proprietary version unless you're actually relying on the few extra custom features/addons it provides over the open source one.
