Go read the actual thread. There was a bug someone found that files you have in there that aren’t even associated with git still get deleted. I’m not entirely convinced this was the poster’s fault.
It’s not a bug, it’s intentional. They consider changes to be any change since the last commit including in untracked files. They did update it to make this behavior a lot more obvious though.
This comment in particular does a great job of explaining the UX problem with this. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/32459#issuecomment-322160461
Yes, honestly this situation reminds me a lot of the LTT trying Linux and destroying his system by installing steam despite apt warning him in the best way it really could that he probably didn’t want to do that. Sure the package shouldn’t have been in that state in a stable distro but shit happens. It goes to that point of, users will go through great lengths to achieve the end goal blindly jumping past warnings on the way no matter how dire they might be.