The plugin was easily installed but complained that pls couldn't be started.

I reckoned that a cpanm installation of pls was needed, which is kind of huge because of Perl::Critic and PPI.

But it failed because of IO::Async

I fell back on --force installations for IO::Async and PLS, but on startup I VS-Code is still complaining

[Error - 17:41:45] Starting client failed
Launching server using command pls failed.
[download]

I think I know now why the Perl-Navigator is using a JS Server for the communication.

On a side note: I'm pretty sure The CamelCade plugin for intelliJ showed Perl::Critic output too, but without a need of installation. I suppose this was all bundled inside the plugin.