Your message gave me the idea to check the .vcxproj file directly and sure enough, Debug and Release were (quite) different, the relevant offending bit of XML in the Debug linker area was
<IgnoreAllDefaultLibraries>true</IgnoreAllDefaultLibraries>
malpropism via Digitalmars-d-learn Sun, 26 Apr 2020 15:40:39 -0700
Your message gave me the idea to check the .vcxproj file directly and sure enough, Debug and Release were (quite) different, the relevant offending bit of XML in the Debug linker area was
<IgnoreAllDefaultLibraries>true</IgnoreAllDefaultLibraries>