Debugging Maui project on Mac with embedded nested frameworks

[pcullen1]

On my Mac M1 with Sequoia 15.3.1, I'm using VS Code and I'm trying to test a NLI stack with a NET MAUI project but I'm having trouble with an embedded native library that I built, that doesn't execute properly. If I run my unit test from XCode, I can step into my Swift wrapper and then into my native call into my C library, which in turn calls another native library successfully. But if I instead hit that same call by my .NET MAUI app by way of my binding project, that same method executes but the call into my native wrapper fails somehow. I have verified that all libraries are loaded in the MAUI process. I have built everything with DWARF so that debugging symbols are included. The binding project's reference includes the Debug option. In Visual Studio Code, the point I want to debug says External Code, no symbols loaded. I can't figure out how to set "justMyCode" to false in the MAUI lanch.json - I don't think it's supported. On the XCode side I'm using developer signing/automatically sign.
So to illustrate, here is the swift wrapper method:

import Foundation

@objc(DotnetABCDevice)
public class DotnetABCDevice : NSObject
{

@objc
public static func sendRequest(request: String) -> String {
    let param = UnsafePointer<Int8>((request as NSString).utf8String)
    send_request(param) //this line seems to get skipped
    return "Request received: " + request //TODO return response
}

}

The method send_request which is a call into C code apparently gets skipped or otherwise fails somehow and I need to understand why. The parameter request is set as an UnsafePointer because on the other side it's a const char*. I can see that the return statement does execute properly in the VS Code debugger.

That method send_request makes another call to an external native library that I built from source.

To better illustrate the chain of calls, it looks like this:
MAUI -> Binding project -> xcode built framework (where the excerpted code lies) -> embedded Frameworks folder -> external library

So, I want to step in and see what's going on, but I'm blocked from doing that from the top of the stack from a MAUI app. How do I set up VS Code to let me step in to where the problem lies?