After creating a new ArcPy environment within a standalone installation of Anaconda, any attempt to import ArcPy within a VSCode Jupyter Notebook crashes the kernel.
This same setup worked without any issues since ArcPy was released on Anaconda in 2.7.
ArcPy also successfully imports within a standard Jupyter Notebook launched from the standalone installation of Anaconda.
This is a bare-bones recipe for creating an ArcPy environment within Anaconda.
conda create -n esri
conda activate esri
conda install -c esri arcpy