The first thing which Visual Studio Code did right was the better performance. The initial reaction to Atom was that it was very promising, but very slow.
The second big innovation was the language server protocol.This allowed any language to be supported by VS Code.
Third, for me at least: Remote Extensions. That suite of extensions including SSH WSL, and Container support made things I was already doing frictionless.
The second big innovation was the language server protocol.This allowed any language to be supported by VS Code.