No need to transpile with @babel/node

Basic setup (sourcemaps – always)

Note the sourceMaps and retainLines options in .babelrc:

{
  "presets": [
    "@babel/preset-env"
  ],
  "sourceMaps": "inline",
  "retainLines": true
}

And then in launch.json:

{
  "type": "node",
  "request": "launch",
  "name": "Debug",
  "program": "${workspaceFolder}/index.js",
  "runtimeExecutable": "${workspaceFolder}/node_modules/.bin/babel-node",
  "runtimeArgs": [
    "--nolazy"
  ]
}

Advance setup (sourcemaps – development only)

You can tweak the above so only to generate source-maps/retainLines in development mode:

{
  "presets": [
    "@babel/preset-env"
  ],
  "env": {
    "development": {
      "sourceMaps": "inline",
      "retainLines": true
    }
  }
}

And:

{
  "type": "node",
  "request": "launch",
  "name": "Debug",
  "program": "${workspaceFolder}/index.js",
  "runtimeExecutable": "${workspaceFolder}/node_modules/.bin/babel-node",
  "runtimeArgs": [
    "--nolazy"
  ],
  "env": {
    "BABEL_ENV": "development"
  }
}

Notes

• Currently "type": "pwa-node" (see more) doesn’t work with this setup.
• For "--nolazy" see this.
• "BABEL_ENV": "development" – Unless a different value is set the default is development, so adding this in the launch config is not essential (but does make things more explicit).