> One does need plugins with Vim for anything big.
When a fresh shell tab is just a command-T/ctrl-T away, you don't need Vim to do any of these things in the first place. The point of Vim is that it's a text editor that lives in an environment where you can already accomplish everything other than text editing.
VSCode is a text editor that uses plugins to bring other programs into VSCode. Vim is a text editor plugin for an environment in which all those programs already run natively.
The problem with basic Vim is that it does not support out-of-the-box tools that can run longer than an invocation of a single command, like language servers, project indexers, tree synchronizers etc. ctags etc. just does not scale. And on Windows and to lesser extent on Mac one needs that even for medium-sized projects.
When a fresh shell tab is just a command-T/ctrl-T away, you don't need Vim to do any of these things in the first place. The point of Vim is that it's a text editor that lives in an environment where you can already accomplish everything other than text editing.
VSCode is a text editor that uses plugins to bring other programs into VSCode. Vim is a text editor plugin for an environment in which all those programs already run natively.