I feel like VS Code is in a very weird place right now.

To just be productive, you need a ton of plugins and often enough these don't really solve all the problems you might have. For example, there's no "java dev" package, instead you have to install a meta-package plus a bunch of other random crap, half of which don't really work out of the box. Or, if you want to use the advanced features, you have to live with weird constraints and bugs. The UI isn't really designed to incorporate more advanced plugins and the plugins themselves often don't work as expected. For example, for some reason, if you connect to a remote host, the java LSP needs the java home dir to be in the same path on both machines, which is just weird.

For a text editor it's way too bloated, but for an IDE it's way to barebones. The days of the nimble and fast advanced editor are gone,

That was my plan, but removing all the stuff specific to my setup takes a bit of time, so I wanted to test the waters first.

I'm still conflicted a bit if maybe the new wiki would be a better place. My Github project is (to a casual googler) just some random bloke on the internet dumping some files, while the wiki is at least somewhat curated and official.

Doing both would be the best, obviously, but I'm also struggling with adulting, so I don't have that much time on my hands.

I would see this rather as a starting point, or maybe a collection of pluggable flakes, I'm not sure yet.

Honestly, Ubuntu and its variants are probably the best distros. It's not great, it has its drawbacks, but to get people started, perfectly fine.