I installed Visual Studio Code and PlatformIO IDE today and have been working with it for a few hours now.

I'll say up front that I have never been a fan of Microsoft. That being said, I have to admit that the combination of VSC and PlatformIO seems to be much more stable than the current Clion/PlatformIO combination. I can build and upload every time. This is a good thing :-)

I will also say, however, that VSC is far inferior to Clion from an IDE standpoint. Many things that are very easy in CLion are difficult or not even possible in VSC (at least as far as I have been able to determine).

Still, in my opinion, the VSC/PlatformIO combination is far superior to the Arduino IDE.