I guess that argument just makes NO sense to me whatsoever. Every IDE attempts to "do everything" because that's literally the point of an integrated development environment. First-party IDEs (MPLAB X, Cube MX, Keil, etc.) do all the same things, sometimes more...
Are you sure you're not actually annoyed at Visual Studio Code, which merely happens to be the most common host for PlatformIO? But you can use it in other IDEs, or use just the CLI version.
Platform i/o makes it worse by trying to do everything for every processor. This might be a strength but usually isn't. Proprietary IDEs are sometimes saved
by at least limiting the damage to one.
I don't need an IDE, I've got Unix. The entire OS is an IDE and does indeed do everything - and does it well. Not in a half-arsed way like most job-specific IDEs. That makes even less of a use-case for platform i/o : it fails to have processor-specific goodness by being all-encompassing and fails to be universal by trying to integrate less and poorer tools than you need. But that's not why I dislike it as that applies to many IDEs.
Yes, the default editor doesn't help. It's possibly not as bad as the previous default editor.
What I don't like about the 'you can change the editor' argument is that you tend to have to dig in pretty deep to change it. By which time you've learnt the wretched thing. Idk if this is the case for PIO, as I said, I was put off it by my first encounter and have avoided it like the plague ever since.