I’m using ch57x-keyboard-tool to configure it
Great! I've bought similar without the dials (I wish I didn't have to pay extra for the stupid LEDs) and was hoping there was something open sourcey to configure it with rather than their dodgy codebase for the same reasons you list!
Exactly, what a god-for-saken horrid solution! I'm all for JSON configuration for really low-down dirty stuff, but for something as simple as this? Eugh, no! Refactoring in Pycharm is fine as far as I can tell, never had any issues with it.
VSCode/ium is fine for single-file python or other such simple stuff, but not for big projects and was an instant deal breaker for me. I hated pycharm when I first started using it, but as I get more used to it, it's way more usable and has some nice little features, so I'll stick with it for now.
I get VSCode from a product marketing point of view and understand why it was created, but I wish it wasn't. One size fits all never works out in the long-term