Also using VSC for quite some years now. With the php-debug extention you can even get a simple PHP debugger which sometimes can really help debugging while at the same time keeping the editor slimmer than a full IDE.
Other “must have’s” that I discovered over the years:
- auto close tag
- auto rename tag
- document this
- paste and indent (sublime can do that natively)
- eslint
- open in github
- open in browser
- project manager (like sublimes project quick switch feature)
- setting sync
- php debug
By the way I once created a GIST with Kirby API snippets (based on Medienbaekers Atom snippets) for VSC. I think thy should still work but I am not 100% sure because one of the recent updates changed their snippet API.