Serial port not found when compiling/uploading Tasmota via VSC

Two questions in compiling via VSC

COM Port
I wanted to compile the latest Tasmota source as I had to enable AWS. Compilation works but when trying to upload there’s an error serial.serialutil.SerialException: could not open port 'COM3'

Upon further checking it appears this COM port is hard coded to COM3 in the PlatformIO files. Checking my system shows that my COM port is at COM7. I have updated platformio_override.ini to COM7 and it worked.

While this is not a big deal - now that I know - I was wondering whether I have to change this every time I flash a different board type; e.g. ESP8266 vs ESP32?

Core version
When compiling for my ESP8266 I see in the VSC console that it uses core 2.6.3. Isn’t that a fairly old core? Looking at the ota location the latest is 2.7.4.9. How do I ensure that PlatformIO pulls the latest core?