I do not think your problem is related to PlotlyJS.jl. I have been teaching a course using this package extensively with more than 300 students a year (3 years, more than a thousand users), and I have never encountered a similar problem to yours. Although most students use Pluto notebooks, some also go with VScode. No problem at all with rendering the plots and saving them as png, pdf, svg, and other formats.
In one of my previous entries in this thread, I wrote something that is not (apparently) correct. Last October, @disberd mentioned the following here :
" The package also got a new breaking release recently and now should have feature parity with PlotlyJS so that every function you can use in PlotlyJS also works in PlutoPlotly.
I am also working on a new release to have it work also outside of Pluto (both standalone html and vscode/documenter) so that it can be potentially used as an alternative to PlotlyBase/PlotlyJS with the same syntax, since those two packages have been having some issues with updates"
I have tested PlutoPlotly in VScode, and it does not render the plots despite no error spitting out. Maybe I am doing something wrong, or perhaps @disberd encountered unexpected problems preventing PlutoPlotly from being used outside Pluto.
Plotly and PlotlyJS are mature packages. Your problem looks very specific to your machine. For example, I have access to two similar computers: at home, I can plot with Plots.jl without problems; at work, Plots.jl does not precompile. I believe the problem is associated with permissions.