@rossc1 Thanks for the inputs, I will for sure add a note in the documentation regarding this issue.
Just as a follow-up from the current status, it is confirmed and while there is a behavior change in our side due to the new licensing mechanism, the issue also comes from Visual Studio Code, reading directly raw string to detect a valid interpreter, and fail if something is not formated as it wants. However, we received the official confirmation from Visual Studio Code that they will not change their implementation, and not support custom interpreters. But we are still on it.
Regarding your needs for an IDE, you can use Pycharm, the only pre-requires is to rename c4dpy to python, unfortunately, we can't officially recommend doing such things since newer OS (Catalina) prevent user changing content of an application package but @dskeith explained everything cleary in How to use c4dpy for Cinema4D R20 SP1.
Cheers,
Maxime.