I don't know what has happened inside Microsoft, but at some point they seem to have shifted into an outright aversion of traditional desktop applications.

I noticed this most when using Visual Studio Code for the first time. An entire IDE, with hundreds of supported languages and a rich plugin systen - but no ability to show dialogs?

Instead they used all kinds of awkward workarounds, such as opening the config file in an editor instead of showing a config GUI, or stretching the "command pallette" widget to its limit, or just dropping you into the shell.

I just never understood why they did this.