I think the point here is that there are two ways to measure impact. One is just a raw "how impressive is this code" score. In that case, self-landing rockets, self driving trucks, etc, all score much higher than VSCode.
On the other hand, an equally valid measure of impact is utility * number of people. While things like self-driving trucks are extremely cool, as of today their overall impact is quite small. VSCode impacts an enormous amount of people every single day and saves them a ton of time.
Well put. Though by that second metric, I'm not sure that the marginal utility of VSCode, relative to a world where Atom existed and was equally free and accessible, would place it in the highest echelon of widespread-utility-creating engineering marvels.
On the other hand, an equally valid measure of impact is utility * number of people. While things like self-driving trucks are extremely cool, as of today their overall impact is quite small. VSCode impacts an enormous amount of people every single day and saves them a ton of time.