I use Pbkit for Protobuf support. There are other extensions available.

I’d experienced problems with the tool when (correctly) import‘ing protobufs under a proto_path and learned that there’s a solution and also learned that it’s possible to use workspace-specific settings.

With a ${workspaceFolder}/protos folder containing:

protos
└── greet
    ├── v1
    │   └── greet.proto
    └── v2
        └── greet.proto

And, in which protos/greet/v2/greet.proto contains:

import "greet/v1/greet.proto";

I had been receiving import and reference errors until I read the Stack overflow answer.