> All it takes is a pretty mild preference for free software in this case.

Presumably, you mean free-as-in-freedom, not free-as-in-beer. Still, there is that VSCode MIT source license to distract the naive.

And that tells us something about the state of the world, unfortunately. The number of folks with that mild preference is small, just going by the overall adoption of free-as-in-freedom software, in general.