There is supposed to be a VS Code debugger extension for Free Pascal.
ext install CNOC.fpdebug
But codium couldn’t find it.
So it appears the best way to debug even Simple Applications is using Lazarus. This creates a project file and everything. You can add breakpoints and look at variables, but writeln() doesn’t output anything. You can still open and run the .lpr with VS Code. It doesn’t appear that you can just open a .lpr or .pas or pp and debug in Lazarus. So I can’t debug my big folder of Pascal programs, I created and tested using Free Pascal, before I knew of Lazarus.
Except for the debugging, Lazarus seems like overkill for simple programs.