What sets IDEs apart from trying to convert an editor to an IDE with a bunch of plugins is:
- somebody somewhere is hopefully sitting down with a cohesive vision of tying these tools together, instead of an assemblage of plugins each with their own visions. I would very much prefer to use their vision (a la macos/windows/Ubuntu) vs trying to configure each plugin to my own (arch/Gentoo). It could be an age thing, but at this point I really don't have the enthusiasm to become an expert at 12 different config file syntaxes and read the docs for all the options for each plugin i would need to tweak.
- an IDE is all encompassing in certain ways that is amazing. For example, Jetbrains is not only a fantastic code editor/refactoring swiss knife, it also has excellent git integration, and can leverage the same code navigation capabilities within diffs and PRs. It will autostash in branch specific stashes, and I can visually browse and diff these. I can attach to databases and get full SQL query and view capabilities, so it isn't just about general purpose programming languages.
- it can be hard to explain to people who haven't used a language specific IDE, how much further along its refactoring capabilities are compared to any LSP. Note that this applies much more to Java/C# than to something like python, both because of static typing and decades of investment.
- as an example of integration, say you add a new function in a file. Not only does Jetbrains highlight the modified file in the Git commit panel, but the structure panel will actually color that function differently and so on.
- due to widespread use of Jetbrains in certain communities, people will build valuable plugins to relatively niche things. So Jetbrains has excellent CMake support and decent Bazel support.
- I like the keyboard, but I also like and acknowledge that the mouse is much better at certain things. For interactive reading, I like I can right click on a commit and say "rebase from here" instead of looking up, copying and posting the red into my git rebase -i command. Conflict resolution, line by line inclusion etc. is also easier with a mouse.
I am very competent at the command line, but beyond a certain project size, IDEs just make sense to me.