Operate yeah. But write lots of code?

Yep. Some orgs require it.

I'm not arguing for it, just saying I've seen it at multiple billion-dollar+-a-quarter companies.

I've done it. It was terrible. I'm glad the project ended.

There's no fixing it, though. I can know the "base tooling with zero config" … and I'm just less productive, that's all there is too it. Customized tooling makes me faster than the base tooling. (I did start trying to find "inventive" ways to try to work around the problem, of course. My case wasn't like military air-gapped or anything, just the only connection was via RDP. So for example, copy & paste is a communication channel.)

Oh that sucks.

I mean there is a middle ground. LSP is good for coding a project. But I do agree with your point. What I generally do (as nvim user) reduces plugins to the bare minimum and try as much as possible to do progressive enhancement (atleast I try). Maybe as nvim improves LSP, I hope the diff between LSP and native methods are close enough that they both work.