“Unlike Tramp, which lives off the land on the remote connection, VSCode mounts a full-scale invasion: it runs a Bash snippet stager that downloads an agent, including a binary installation of Node.”
VS Code Remote installs Node on your server and opens a WebSockets channel back home. That channel can read and edit any file and spawn shells. Security people call that a RAT. Emacs Tramp does the same job with plain shell commands.