r/LaTeX

I am relatively new to LaTeX, and I generally used overleaf.

However, I am planning to use a local instance of LaTeX instead of a cloud based one to avoid issues with outages and site downtime.

However, overleaf had a great interface for LaTeX in terms of clarity and ease of use. Migrating to VSCode, it looks a lot more daunting, having to edit JSON files for user settings and changing compilers and creating bibliographies etc.

Is there any way to make VSCode more easy to use? and are there other local LaTeX apps that are better or is VSCode generally preferred?