VS Code for macOS Ventura immediately crashes on startup

I've done some research into this happening in the past, but can't find any relevant discussions/solutions for the more recent versions of macOS and VSCode.

I downloaded the zip file, expanded it, then dragged the "Visual Studio Code.app" file to the /Applications directory. But, when I open it, I can see the "Code" menu momentarily appear in the top-bar as the application attempts to initialize. (On the first try, I'm prompted about opening the application downloaded from the internet, etc. I choose "Open."). Then the application immediately crashes (give-or-take 1 second). No window appears; no error dialogs; nothing.

I tried removing the quarantine xattr(ibute) from the application, using the prescribed CLI command. But, it didn't seem to help.

My Mac mini has an intel CPU. I've tried downloading both options: "Intel chip" and "universal" .zip files. They both behave the same way. I tried setting VS Code up to run as a portable instance. This made no difference. I've tried turning hardware acceleration off (to false) in the .json config. No change.

The one major caveat of my system is that I'm using an external drive to host the home directory of the primary user account. (I have a 2ndary admin account locally on the mini if anything terrible happens.)

The soldered-in 128GB of PCIe storage quickly disappears, so copying the folder to the external drive and reassigning the account's home directory to point to it seemed like the more feasible option than buying a new Mac to get more storage. All of the other applications on the mac seem to be running normally, including ones I've installed since migrating this home directory to the ext. drive.

Any suggestions, or ways for me to troubleshoot this?

Thanks in advance!