VS Code has the power of emacs and an autogenerating UI which maps to the configuration files. To me, that’s the easy way out—make the UI map one-to-one with the data underneath, obviating the burden of considering the UX of each configuration path, and missing out on the benefits of good UX.
It's sad that you were downvoted for this because you are not wrong at all. VS Code GUI config is a mess, and a lot of the settings are not available there. I just got used to messing with the JSON autocomplete.