As far as I can tell... this isn't VS Code as a dependency, it's Visual Studio (and the associated MSVC C++ compiler) as a dependency. And this has been normal for years when installing native modules with no prebuilt releases in Windows for languages like Node.js.
I think it's technically just the build tools too, not all of visual studio or anything like that. https://github.com/felixrieseberg/windows-build-tools used to be an option for downloading them with relatively little pain. Looks like it should be unnecessary now, though.
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