hsnips | powerful snippet engine for VS Code | Text Editor library

For the past 18 months, I've been using the LaTeX Workshop extension of VSCode for all my LaTeXing needs. Up to this point, I've primarily used it for longer-form articles and reports, and sporadically for note-taking purposes in class. I've been able to make it work sufficiently well in real-time so far with just a few custom macros (Linear Algebra typesets pretty easily). However, as I move on to different classes, I'm looking to expand my real-time abilities by implementing Gilles Castel's excellent Vim-based workflow in VSCode. Unfortunately, VSCode seems to obscure or lack (by default) a great deal of the features (especially related to snippets) of which Castel makes use.

For the purposes of this post, I'd like to focus on his fraction macro (I believe that if I can get this working, I can get much of the rest of it working). Basically, the problem appears to be that VSCode has fairly limited snippets functionality, especially compared to Vim's UltiSnips. Using UltiSnips, Castel has defined an auto-expanding macro (I'm not sure if VSCode supports auto-expanding snippets) that, when a / is typed, takes the preceding word (or words if parentheses are present) and transforms it into the LaTeX fraction format. For example: