Okay, so it seems you certainly fall into the category of people who generally find it worthwhile to learn and configure/modify tools. So I really don't understand how you came to the conclusion that neovim and vim are not worth the time.
Neovim takes a lot less time (weeks to months) to learn than something like git (months to years), while I know both very well, I find that I am more often interacting with my text editor than I am with git.
It seems to me that the tradeoff of using something like VSCode, unless it perfectly matches your particular workflow, is much more friction than dealing with git vs something else.
To that end, if you have given neovim a chance and learned it, then I struggle to see how you had problems with something like e.g. making :Black run automatically before the file is written.
Autocommands are a fundamental vim feature, one of the most important for vim related automation aside from rebinding. Something you will have encountered as soon as you search for "vim how to do X when Y." Figuring out that the PSF black vim plugin is a good option for a way to run black from inside vim is a matter of a 10 second google search. I can understand this being a potentially difficult problem if you really had no neovim configuration experience, but if you have learned neovim then this really is a single line addition to your on_attach which you would have already had to configure for the python language server of your choice.
And even then, the black documentation page explicitly shows how to use vimscript (which can be embedded in nvim lua syntax using vim.cmd, again, a basic neovim feature you would have encountered in any guide to configuring neovim) to achieve this in 4 lines.
I use neovim because it eliminates friction. Whenever I do something and find myself repeating an editing or reading adjacent task and making mistakes I think to myself: "how can I solve this once and for all?" I sit down, fix it in neovim and lua in 20-40 minutes. How do I justify the time investment? The 40 minutes (or hell, even if it took 2 hours it would still be worth it) investment once every couple of months to improve some aspect of my workflow keeps the friction down and the reduced friction more than makes up for the 40 minutes or 2 hours of lost time because I would lose much more time on frustration and lack of motivation.
This friction doesn't affect everyone as much as it does me, which is why I notice other people, less affected than me, don't find dealing with learning and configuring/modifying/writing tooling to be worthwhile. But again, what you wrote indicates to me that this kind of friction _does_ matter to you.
So my question is, how do you justify the friction of VSCode (as you yourself put it, VSCode isn't perfect) when you have tools such as vim, neovim, emacs, or whatever else that are designed to help reduce friction for a modest but steep initial learning curve.