One particular pain for me in VSCode is that it puts a .vscode folder in my repo, which I have to specifically exclude from git every single time.

That's pretty standard behavior for IDEs. Like Jetbrains IDEs store their config in a .idea folder in the root of the workspace, Visual Studio has a config directory in the root of the workspace, xcode probably does the same thing... It's standard practice, and a simple thing to account for - as you said, just add it to your .gitignore and you're golden. That allows people to use whatever IDE they want and configure it however they like.