This isn't something specific to VSCode being popular. When I was in college over a decade ago, there were students using Sublime with an SFTP plugin, coding locally and copying stuff with FileZilla or other similar GUI clients to transfer files (I distinctly remember seeing some program that was named something duck-related but for the life of me I can't remember any other specifics). Sublime in particular could be frustrating in the class I TA'd where they had some assignments to deal with processing some (very basic) machine code to simulate running the tool the class used to assemble and run the code from the (similarly basic) ISA they had been taught, which involved them using hexdump or something similar to understand how the bytes in the files worked, but Sublime "helpfully" would render the object files as as their text representation of the hexdump, with extra spacing for readability and swapped endianness compared to the way the bytes would show up if hexdumped on the school's Linux server. There would always be several students every semester who would show up at office hours unable to figure out why their code that was written to try to read an ASCII string like "AD DE EF BE " but instead would instead find some text they didn't recognize because they didn't think to look at the actual byte values, which would always just happen to start with 0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, and 0xEF.