GitLab team member here.

There is more context in this blog post: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/05/23/the-future-of-the-g...

The TLDR is that the Web IDE is a widely used feature (tens of millions of commits have been made using it) and building our new Web IDE with VS Code will allow us to invest in extending the experience to be more tightly integrated with GitLab and the DevOps workflow rather than re-creating VS Code features in our Web IDE.

Why integrating the most used IDE/Editor?

Some companies are already moving to remote IDE models for a variety of reasons, I would prefer using this Gitlab IDE over a VPS hosted in the company cloud for sure.

That's the last question I would ask.

Moving back actually. About 20 years ago I used IDEs over X Windows remote sessions, and in many projects VS over RDP was also an option.

It will certainly benefit me as a user. I frequently use the current web editor for small changes and it's really not that great.