In college the night before a big computer programming project was due, all of us students met in the computer lab and basically copied one student who had his working. The Professor obviously noticed and told us all to do it again.
Not notebooks but my Dad never let us kids use his guitars because they were too nice. So we never learned guitar. I picked it up later in life and now leave them out for my kids to mess with. Sure, they'll be out of tune and the pick will go missing, but I feel it's more important that they get used as much as possible for everyone. No point in leaving stuff stored away.
My team tried it out at the beginning of Covid. It performed really bad for me. I've heard it's better now, but that experience really turned me off to it.
VSCode is 100% free. IntelliJ has a free and enterprise license. I could download the free one, but I feel like I'm missing out on features and would rather go with the option that has everything free. Then I don't have to worry about it. Even though it may not be as good.