Edit - Since this has so many 👎, I need to be very clear, we will never remove editing settings.json files. This is about the UI in the JSON editor, e.g. the pencil icons, the split view, the search bar, etc.

Now that the settings UI is stable, we should consider getting rid of the split JSON settings UI. It would just mean less code to maintain, and new UX feature investment can be focused on the UI.

I think that by default, we would open the default settings and settings.json side by side, and the setting workbench.settings.openDefaultSettings would still control whether the default settings editor is opened.

We need a better understanding of how many people are using it over the settings UI.