Man, my experience with VS Code has been the polar opposite, especially WRT the "Just Works" description of the debugger. Some folks on my team rave about it, so I gave it a real shot, but it's just not workable for me.

Errors left and right from core JS functions. Unable to create temp directories, complaining that they already exist, and deleting those directories leads to complaints that they're missing. Running the exact same start command from the command line works smoothly, so I have to think it's some "magic" that VS Code is trying to do. I gave up and went back to IntelliJ.