The amazing thing about Emacs is that you can run a snippet of elisp from anywhere at any time. I never found this to be a major advantage of Emacs for my own workflow, but if it matters to you, editors like VS Code won't cut it.
The more structured approach to building extensions in VS Code prevents namespace issues and improves robustness at the cost of runtime flexibility.
I occasionally use the Python console in Sublime Text to achieve the same thing as the Emacs scratch buffer, but Sublime also has more structured plugins than Emacs. I guess it's also technically possible to pop open the JavaScript console in VS Code, but I don't think that's recommended or very productive.
