I think they must mean legacy visual studio, rather than VSCode.
VSCode is of course very portable. It also seems to be Microsoft’s (successful) attempt to get everybody to use a reasonable Linux-style workfow. If you look at it as a text editor and terminal in a tiling window manager, it suddenly makes sense that it became so popular.
There is nothing legacy about Visual Studio. There is simply no equivalent of its debugging and profiling capabilities in C++ and C# especially in graphics / game development. No such equivalent exist in Unix world including macOS. They set the bar.
If you're referring to Visual Studio, then Visual Studio Community[0] is free (for individuals and "non-enterprise organizations") and is equivalent to Visual Studio Professional.
Unless you mean VSCode which is cross platform.