Yeah, like I said, why would one company develop two direct competitors that are nearly identical instead of focusing on one?

Corporate consolidation tends to inheritly reduce competition / redundancy / resiliency, but that's not the same thing as an EEE strategy that is out here trying to extinguish open source projects in replace of their proprietary version. In this case Microsoft is shutting down one redundant (in their minds) open source project to focus resources on their other more popular one that is also being offered completely for free and open source under an MIT license.

You can even use VSCodium if you want none of the Microsoft branding (or fork it yourself to customize it, like many of the other tech giants do). This isnt open source being shut out so much as the industry standardizing on a specific open source project.