I use terminal in VSCode very often, so I almost always have it open. It defaults to opening at the bottom of the window, but if you move it to the side so it’s stretched vertically, you gain so much more useable screen real estate for your actual code without sacrificing too much readability in the terminal.
I hate the embedded terminal personally and just use a “real” one in its own window.
Dropdown terminals, can’t live without em. I usually have it tied to rctrl + down arrow or something similar