VS Code is effectively a SSR IDE. Electron and node are the 'server' side of it and are necessary for interacting with the filesystem and all the native things browsers can't access (running processes, terminals, etc.). It has a somewhat complex RPC model (inherent to all Electron apps in general) where JS code on the browser frontend side has to make requests with JS code on the node side and vice-versa, just like most Next.js style SSR apps. It's a very similar ball of complexity for better or worse as mentioned in this gist/blog post, and in general very necessary as browsers are only taking baby steps to give full access to file systems, processes, hardware, etc.