I think enough of VS Code is open sourced to where if it truly were necessary to do a more serious fork with a community market place and all that jazz it would probably build up a userbase. Developers dont like certain amounts of shennanigans from companies. If Microsoft doesnt want to risk a mass exodus they will make sure not to do anything extra stupid with VS Code. Especially considering for some its the one Microsoft product sucking them in.
Update:
On the other hand with Neovim being able to run headless you may just need that and VS Code stripped and use Neovim for the underlying editing and plugins if you really wanted to have a more open VS Code ecosystem. Kind of a hack, but it would work.
Update:
On the other hand with Neovim being able to run headless you may just need that and VS Code stripped and use Neovim for the underlying editing and plugins if you really wanted to have a more open VS Code ecosystem. Kind of a hack, but it would work.