In my experience, "Intellisense" is shorthand for "broken autocompletion"
I don't use Microsoft IDEs often, but have had experience with them many times over the past 15 years. And every single time, intellisense would freeze, get confused, or just stop working completely. Not once in 15 years have I had a passable experience with it, so nowadays when I'm in Microsoft land I always immediately disable intellisense before I start working.
I completely understand your feelings. I also always faced quite a lot of issues with Visual Studio (not vscode) autocompletion when trying to write C++. But when it decides to work the experience is great.
Visual Studio Code on the other hand is just fantastic. I was a hardcore emacs user until I switched to VSCode as my main editor a few years ago due to the crazy good auto-completion experience.
I could’ve written this comment. I made myself use VSCode for about a week, and that was about the last time I seriously used Emacs.
I had the privilege of chatting with the VSCode booth people at PyCon a couple years ago. I was waxing enthusiastic about some feature or another and one of the other people at the booth spun around — “I wrote that!”, and then I got to tell him how much I loved his work. That felt great.
I don't use Microsoft IDEs often, but have had experience with them many times over the past 15 years. And every single time, intellisense would freeze, get confused, or just stop working completely. Not once in 15 years have I had a passable experience with it, so nowadays when I'm in Microsoft land I always immediately disable intellisense before I start working.