About 10 years ago (funny that you mentioned that era earlier), before WSL, I was using Sublime Text, mintty and MinGW.

I even had a project to auto-spin a unix-like shell for windows: http://github.com/alganet/shunt (doesn't work anymore since ms crippled wscript).

VSCode is just another bloated Sublime Text clone. Language servers are a fine addition and I respect them, but pretty much everything else is a ms-branded copy. It's good, and I like it, but considering what it could be it kinda sucks too.