Hi, younger programmer here who's first programming experience was Visual Studio and .NET (that's a lie my first programming experience was a decade earlier with yabasic and notepad but given that I only ran about three programs I'm loathe to count it) my tiny laptop struggled to run Visual Studio and I was working a lot in server admin so naturally started using vi. Vi came without any modern features and when I tried to move back to Vs code I hated it so much. The screen was so busy and every time I typed something I was distracted by 100 different suggestions, sometimes I would accidentally press a key and paste a load of code in I didn't need. By this time I had already gotten proficient at vi keybindings, got any information about an API I needed from scouring the documentation/manpages(please every one make a lot more manpages). I then decided to see how much I could strip back without really affecting productivity. Anyway a few months ago I switched off syntax highlighting and now other people's editors look like a mess to me. Anyway I love that I can program in any environment on any machine as long as a text editor is available. Makes me feel like I'm not beholden to Microsoft or jetbrains when they inevitably tighten the licenses and I think it makes me a better programmer because I have to read and think about the APIs I'm calling.

tl;dr modern ide's abstract you away from compilation pipelines and make you more reliant on intellisense than reading docs. Syntax highlighting is a psyop designed to kill the art.