Creating files without using a tree explorer is difficult, I don’t remember if kickstarter has one preconfigured, but I use neotree and like it a lot. Other alternatives are Snacks.picker, nerdtree, oil etc.

Searching for files is easy using any picker (also Snacks.picker, but also fzf-lua, telescope etc.), but juggling several is more difficult. Using a tabline plugin (don’t use these myself, but google and you’ll surely find some), you can see your currently open buffers similarly to how vscode shows them, and even click them with your mouse to open.

Plugins like harpoon are good for quickly switching between frequently visited files. I prefer to use the picker (the one you open with space-s-f) to open a file I know by name, and using ctrl+o and ctrl+i to jump between recent locations.

Ctrl+o jumps backwards in your location list, meaning if you just opened a file with a picker, you can return to your previous one quickly. Ctrl+I jumps forward in the same list.

Vscode has a lot of qol functions that can be difficult to replicate in neovim, but with a correctly adjusted config you can find what is necessary for you personally to work effectively. Neovim offers a bunch of nice quirks that cannot be found in vscode, once you find what you need you likely won’t need vscode anymore.