They’re really not. As much as I hate commercial licensing for any dev tools, if you want to talk about superior there’s nothing quite as good as Visual Studio (not code) on Windows.
It really depends on what kind of project you’re working on. For .NET projects that might be true, but for other languages such as anything involving C++ then Visual Studio lags way behind CLion, which is multiplatform to boot.
OP is right. For web development with JavaScript frameworks (React, Angular, etc) with Node and even Typescript, you either use vscode or you haven’t discovered vscode yet.