Software has a problem.
OK, it has many problems. I’ve already highlighted one of them. But this is another important one.
The problem is that software—all software, with no exceptions—sucks. The reason for this is multifaceted and we could spend years and years arguing about who has the larger list of reasons, but in the end it boils down to the proverbial shoemaker’s children: Our development tools are the worst of the worst in software.
Well first, it’s not “just a GUI”, it’s a layer slathered atop the already very broken VSCode. Or, rather, PlatformIO GUI is a layer slathered atop VSCode that puts a GUI front-end over PlatformIO Core (a CLI environment). This core itself tries to thread together a bunch of libraries and frameworks into something resembling a coherent whole, but fails at that task because support of each of these frameworks and libraries varies highly in quality, and by the time you unravel that entire mess you could have already finished your application if it’s a non-trivial one. (As with a lot of popular tools, trivial applications can be a button push away, practically.)
In the end it was easier to drop PlatformIO in the middle of a project and rewrite from scratch without its meandering mess than it would have been to keep playing the sunk cost fallacy game.