What can regular people even do about this? It's a disgusting overreach if it ends up happening. And if it's all being performed by private companies, in industries where there is very little choice of competitors, there's no violation of rights and no way for us to avoid having our private messages be scrutinized by some authority.
I think VS Code in this case is just trying to emulate the behavior of terminal history. Another commenter mentioned that Vim was the same. Up and down arrow navigating history seems to be a more common thing in the Unix-y world, which VS Code is trying to appeal to.
Every tools takes getting used to and learning it's quirks. Where there are problems within VS Code, there will be different problems in IntelliJ. I quite like VS Code while disliking IntelliJ. Same old story of differing preferences.
> Someone thought that manually editing JSON files is a suitable GUI for configuring basic settings.
There has been a GUI editor for settings for a while now, as well as the JSON editor.
Maybe you can start that?