For programming, my favourite is DejaVu Sans Mono. There are many fancy ones out there with hip features like ligatures but I have always found DejaVu the most pleasing to the eye.
For reading, I like Roboto for sans serif. I find it is decently condensed yet easy to read. For serif, I like a paid font called Century Supra. I have pirated this font many times. I also like the serif fonts used by imperialist news outlets a lot as well. IIRC NYT's is straight up called Imperial.
Lol, this post reminded me I never set up my fonts in VSCodium. Fixed!
For programming, I use JetBrains Mono. I saw it on a post on /r/programmerhumor once and sort of fell in love with it. Using it with a Tokyo Night theme in VSCodium(officially) and it's really nice. Here's a quick screenshot with some JS and HTML to get an idea:
For Sans, I really like both Roboto and SegoeUI but any of the top fonts on FontSource are nice. I'm using Poppins for a website now but I don't like how it looks with heavier weights. It's pretty thick. The CSS framework I am using has Inter as it's first font and then falls back to the usual suspects. So Inter is starting to grow on me just for readability. Might switch back to it from Poppins to makes my life easier. I also like Montserrat because I'm basic. Lato, not so much. Also Arial and Helvetica are nice fallbacks.
For Serif, I'm not super picky but like you said, anything "newsy-looking" is probably good. I for some reason like Roboto Slab. I donno what the difference is between Serif and Slab though, if any.
Slab fonts are usually meant for displaying or printing in larger sizes. Like news headines, billboards etc.
Heck, that's probably good to know. Regular serif is cool too lol.