VS Code ~= VS. It's a text editor, not an IDE (unless you consider things like VIM to be IDEs because you can use plugins to do IDE-like stuff with them.)
That's kind of a marketing distinction. VS is not a kind of monolithic spaghetti monster system: internally, it is made of components, which provide a text editor, indexing for various languages, etc.
You can do likewise with VS Code or other environments, except maybe some plugins are not installed by default.
In the end it boils down to: how do we define an IDE? And even if it is about bundled capabilities, I would still be able to create a "dedicated" (would not need much modification) Linux distro and declare it to be an IDE.
It was easier to distinguish IDE from other things in the MS-DOS era.
