What makes you think that having the focus on the search box vs the code area in VSC constitutes a different mode in the same way as vim normal vs insert modes?

What makes you think that having the focus on the search box vs the code area in VSC constitutes a different mode in the same way as vim normal vs insert modes? You haven’t explained what you consider a mode to be. I think there is something very clearly different in vim, as first time users must have it explained to them that typing `j` when their cursor is at the start of the code area will do very different things depending on the mode they’re in. It’s a paradigm not present in editors like VSCode. This difference is usefully characterized as “modal”.