IDK man, I’ve had rather poor experience with extensions. At least in gnome they pretty much filled in for some feature that should have been there but it wasn’t hip enough for GNOME (ie systray).

Ever since gnome 3 came out I found myself time and time again in the loop where something is missing, I build myself some smorgasbord of extensions to make the experience the way I want it, then a new gnome minor is released and some of those extensions are now abandoned / incompatible with others / suddenly buggy / behaving differently so I have to start over. It’s not very different in kde, extensions get abandoned and break in there too, but I never had to have more than two at a time.

When it comes to DEs I’ve learned over the years to stick to the core as much as possible because extensions are just not reliable, which is also the reason why I don’t use gnome anymore.

I don’t think the analogy with IDEs really holds: language extensions in major IDEs are usually maintained with some degree of professionalism, for example the Ansible extension for vscode is maintained by Red Hat. It’s a very different ecosystem from the one made of pet projects started by people who one time felt something was amiss in their DE, and pray the gods they still have that opinion and care enough.

Edit: just to be clear I’m not dunking on this extension or extensions in general, I’m just explaining why somebody would want to avoid relying on them too much