@captainn and @mattblackdev mentioned the new Auto Attach feature (Auto-attaching to Node processes) in the old thread “Meteor 1.6 server debugging with VS Code”.
Most posts in that thread are now obsolete and should therefore now be ignored. So it makes sense to make this new thread to announce and discuss this new feature.
To enable Auto Attach: Click View, Command Palette, Debug: Toggle Auto Attach. You’d see “Auto Attach: On” on the bottom orange bar.
Whenever you run the app with meteor --inspect or --inspect-brk it will pause execution at any breakpoints that had been set at any time.
This should now be the recommended way to debug in Visual Studio Code.