Long story short, by default, vs code, after you have a new commit, offers you a sync operation.
Our new / git naive developers will use this “helpful” action, but in turn, they often mess up their branches if there are any pending changes to integrate, because they don’t understand what sync is doing. I have seen users use it on a master branch, so the first part of sync happens and then the push fails… oy vey, what a nightmare to try and explain this to someone who barely grasps the concept of source control.

Now, I know I can set git.enableStatusBarSync to disable the little corner icon.

Thing is, I do want the status of “pending changes”, i.e. something to pull and something to push, but I don’t want it to be clickable/usable to start a sync. Maybe that’s not possible. I couldn’t find anything in the options.

I would also prefer to change the source control action specifically to be a push

For same reason, I would prefer the user experiences an error rather than having sync cause a merge they don’t understand. This way they can rebase or whatever other strategy.