I was eventually able to fix this error by restarting the Azure virtual machine that contains my Windows development environment.

It feels a little ridiculous to add restarting the computer as a solution on StackOverflow, but I've been trying to fix this problem for longer than I'd like to admit and wish I had been reminded to try that earlier.

I was going completely insane trying to fix this problem. I deleted the cache, I disabled the extensions, I disabled gpu acceleration, I found the settings.json, added an entry for files.maxMemoryForLargeFilesMB and tried playing with different values (despite that it didn't seem to be using a huge amount of memory, OOM errors being present intermittently led me to try this). I looked at the main log file and saw several different errors, mostly saying unexpectedly terminated with a couple recurring numeric codes that didn't seem to be referenced specifically anywhere else. I uninstalled and reinstalled VS Code and even tried installed VSCodium to use that instead, but it wasn't until that crashed also that it occurred to me to restart the computer.