Saying “Install Visual Studio” is like handing contributors a choose-your-own-adventure book riddled with bad endings, some of which don’t let you go back. And heaven help you if you need to downgrade to an older version of the build tools for a legacy project. The Visual Studio ecosystem is built on a legacy of ‘all-in-one’ monoliths. If a teammate has a slightly different Build Tools version, your builds can silently diverge. The key insight is that Microsoft publishes JSON manifests describing every component in Visual Studio, the same manifests the official installer uses.