I'm using PlatformIO now, but in my experience the installation experience is hit and miss, due to lack of feedback while downloading and installing things. It just hangs, and you don't know if it failed.

A workaround is to not follow their suggestion to install from the VS Code plugin and install the command line tools instead.

Also, serial monitoring and plotting isn't very good. I ended up writing my own: https://serialviz.skybrian.com/

That said, package management is more sane. Having a platformio.ini file that you can check in helps with reproducibility.