Visual Studio Code – How can I remove explorer listitem hover tooltips in VS Code?

That area of the UI is called the explorer. What you’re seeing is generally called a "tooltip" in UI terminology. Looking through the available settings at the time of this writing, I do not see a setting to disable tooltips for the explorer listitems.

I looked through settings containing "tooltip" and ones starting with explorer. and workbench.list. and didn’t find such a configuration point.

If you open the developer tools with the Developer: Toggle Developer Tools command, you’ll see that that particular tooltip is just implmeneted with the HTML title attribute. The way that it is rendered is up to the browser, which in this case is chromium, and the particular style it appears in differs by platform / OS.

I don’t think it’s possible to write an extension that removes those title attributes. See https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-capabilities/overview, which states:

However, we also impose restrictions upon extensions to ensure the stability and performance of VS Code. For example, extensions cannot access the DOM of VS Code UI.

What you can do is write a feature-request issue ticket to the VS Code GitHub repo asking for such a setting to be created to disable these and explaining why you think that would be a desirable thing to have. Bear in mind that for feature-requests to make it into their backlog, it needs to get enough thumbs-up reactions from the rest of the community. If you do create such an issue ticket, add a link to it here for posterity.