We now have the ability to let the user decide whether arguments passed to a debuggee in a terminal should be escaped for the shell. This is adopted in js-debug, microsoft/vscode-js-debug#1335, also see microsoft/vscode#149910, would love to see it adopted for python in August. In js-debug, the args property can be a string or an array of strings. If it's just a string, the args are not escaped. I can talk more about what it will take to adopt this if needed.