Few places to look for the NPM-Scripts explorer :
The npm-scripts explorer can be enabled or disabled with the below settings, in VSCode’s settings.json:
"npm.enableScriptExplorer": false
Default value is false, change to true and it should work. Try restarting VSCode for changes to take effect(although a restart is not often required) if it doesn’t show up.
Another very hard to notice place is the three dots ... in the top right corner of your project explorer (verify if NPM scripts is checked). This is something which I had experienced personally for a different extension.
