What made it a game changer?

I also had the subjective impression it got worse in the last week or so

I think the timeout just applies to the initial opening of the connection. But maybe try the pre-release version of the extension. Other than that I'm out of ideas - good luck!

It's working fine for me now that I increased the ssh timeout in my vscode settings, so maybe it was just my slow home internet on my end. There was a release of the extension yesterday though, which may explain why your issue suddenly got worse.

Since when are you seeing this? I just tried to open an ssh connection and it failed, despite working fine all day, albeit from work rather than home...

Not using copilot or many extensions generally.

No issues on my end