You can turn telemetry off in VSCode but I think it first sends some stuff back on first install and then again to tell Microsoft you disabled telemetry.
If you want to use VSCode but don't like the telemetry then you can use VSCodium which is the project that creates open source binaries from the "Code OSS" repos and in the process removes telemetry. Worth noting that the final packaged "VSCode" binaries are not open source which builds binaries from the VSCode source that Microsoft has made available.
Some extensions, even the ones published to the OpenVSX registry, also "phone home" to Microsoft so even with VSCodium you can't be certain.
Otherwise there are plenty of alternatives (for text/code editing at least - not sure of other editors that have Joplin integration like @rxliuli's Joplin plugin, although Neovim has Jopvim).
Actually the other project I've been working on is a community driven fork of the Atom editor called Pulsar which started when Microsoft decided to sunset Atom in favour of VSCode. The first thing we did was actually to strip all of the telemetry out of it, the only thing we keep track of now is if a package is installed or starred so we can maintain our package registry (of course even that can be avoided if you installed package manually).