Why do you think it doesn't hold anything meaningful? How is it more convenient for participants?

This only overrides the settings at a project level, so it shouldn't interfere with other settings or projects.

Why do you think it doesn't hold anything meaningful? How is it more convenient for participants?

I mean meaningful to 'business' data serving repository's objective (on its own) - working with grants applications and rfps.

.vscode folder contains metadata for particular IDE configuration, which is (AFAIK) usually placed out of git repository (at least in codebase repositories) for several reasons, to name a few:

• Not every project contributor uses VS Code for working with markdown files, they could use editor of their choice.
  (although in this case this folder won't interfere)
• Probably not everyone uses the same markdownlint extension being configured in settings.json currently
• Users can have other preferences of their own in the same folder and file (see my example below).

This only overrides the settings at a project level, so it shouldn't interfere with other settings or projects.

Real example comes from my particular case:
I setup the peacock workspace coloring extension, which adds its preferences to the same .vscode/settings.json file, causing conflicting issues on every commit.

That's not a huge problem for myself, but as I see hundreds of contributors to this same repo, and more are expected to come, I thought such a fix could be helpful

Makes sense, editor-specific settings shouldn't be part of the repo

Do you have a better suggestion for sharing linting rules so our linters don't interfere with each other? Something that doesn't require manual updating?

How is this file causing conflicts?

I don't agree with merging this. If you don't use markdownlint, the file has no effect. If you edit the file, just don't commit it.

The only people working on the same files is the grants team, and even if it's not common to have settings in a public repo, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages unless I'm misunderstanding how peacock or others are affected by it.