Not everything successful is due to marketing. VSCode is extremely accessible, performant enough, has a huge ecosystem tuned for a plug'n'play experience and is free, among other graces.
It's just a great text editor for programmer's to get productive fast, both beginners and experts.
Have you ever compared the system resource demands of emacs and vim or neovim when you add enough plugins or extensions to reach feature parity with VS Code? They get to be just about as demanding on your disk space, ram and idle cpu.
I'm torn. I'm not meaning to claim that marketing is the sole requirement for success. That said, when the topic is raising the profile, I see profile as market share. Which... Needs a marketing budget.
It's just a great text editor for programmer's to get productive fast, both beginners and experts.