An additional hurdle is that I now have to use the full path to a script when I run it in the VS Code command line (rather than the relative path, which previously worked). Will update if I can figure out how to configure that in a VS Code "Task."
Oh, hmm. Ha, after chasing that problem a bit, it seems like the last issue may have been a little bug with VS Code. Once I modified the tasks.json file and restarted, the task started working only once I reverted to how it was before my changes. So, maybe I just had to restart VS Code?
In any event, I now have it working again!