My re-spec online classes started by installing VS Code and connecting it to user's own GitHub repository that was then used to upload homework in Jupyter notebook format. It was pretty streamlined, that is good when you want to fast-forward into making students write their own first code lessons, leaving off technicalities, but there we didn't heard a word about if any of these three choices are necessary to start coding. I only recently got interested enough to research other options, at the same time I left Windows as a default OS. I'm not sure any of my classmates would tho until something critical happens, and for many this pipeline is probably what they are still using by now.