Not busting my quota is simply not my top priority. I'm on their $200/month plan and I have it locked to a $1000/month overage limit, though the most I've ever gone through using it every day, all day is about $700. That probably sounds like a lot if you're optimizing for a $20/month token budget, but it's budgeted for. That $10-12k/year is excellent value for the silly amount of functionality that I've been able to create.
Sonnet is a really good LLM, and you can build great things with it. However, if you're using this for serious work, IMO you probably want to use the most productive tools available.
Opus 4.1 was, to be real, punishingly expensive. It made me sweat. Thank goodness that Opus 4.5 is somehow both much better and much cheaper.
Edit, I see you answered this in another response, thanks.
I don't have any interest in yucking anyone's yum, but for me, I find working in and IDE to be vastly more productive than trying to remember dozens of vim and tmux shortcuts.
I haven't personally tried the CC extension because like you, I concluded that it sounds like a single-company Cursor with way fewer points of integration into the IDE.
I hate bikeshedding and rarely do I switch tooling unless something is demonstrably better; preferably 10x better. For me, the Cursor IDE experience is easily 10x better than copying and pasting from ChatGPT, which is why I created this thread in the first place.