While trying to diagnose a problem I found that the Plugin Registration Tool was crashing and shutting itself down while replaying a plugin execution. Unfortunately for me, this was happening before the step I wanted to investigate, ensuring the replay didn’t get far enough through the execution.
From stepping through with the debugger I could see the crash always happened at the same point: the first time the execution had called an external web API.
A quick search on this made it clear that I’m not the only one. For example this post and this post show the problem goes back quite a number of years, so it’s a bit disappointing to find it still doesn’t work in 2023.
Unfortunately, it looks like there’s nothing you can do about it. Your only option is to use an approach other than debugging, such as adding a lot of trace calls for more detailed logging.
To clarify, the plugin execution itself is perfectly happy with external web calls, it’s just the Plugin Registration Tool’s ability to replay the execution for debugging that can’t cope with it.