This is actually an issue with some VS code clients. I'm not sure why, but on some computers it has trouble with paths that use './' to move to the parent directory.
As you can see in the above, both of these lines of code would do the same thing. The difference lies in the path of "config.json". The first one uses "./config.json" whereas the second uses the full path to the file. To fix your issue, you would need to change every instance of "./<FILENAME>" to "<FULL PATH TO FILE>\<FILENAME>".
Sorry if this is unclear, it's tricky to word.