I had the same issue for content creators that didn’t have Visual Studio installed. They couldn’t open our C++ Project in the Unreal Editor. I fixed it by installing the Build Tools separately. They can be found here at the bottom of the page: Download Visual Studio Tools - Install Free for Windows, Mac, Linux
They were then able to compile the C++ UE4 projects. Still annoying that they had to install that but at least they don’t need Visual Studio itself.
Hope this helps.