Workspace-scoped references, rename, and go to implementation. These features use your workspace root as the search scope, so behavior will vary based on the directory you open in your editor
If you haven't already, it sounds like it would probably be worth your time to open an issue. If things like workspace-scoped references and renaming aren't working for you when they are working for other people, perhaps you have a non-standard setting, or perhaps there is a need to adjust how you open vscode, or perhaps you are hitting bug(s). My experience has been the people working on gopls are very responsive.
VS Code is a text editor not an IDE, right? That's what its proponents always boasted in the beginning at least.
I just got work to pay for a GoLand licensed for me. The VSC experience was slower, more RAM hungry and not as full featured, so it didn't really make sense to stick with.
From the v0.3.0 release notes[1]:
Workspace-scoped references, rename, and go to implementation. These features use your workspace root as the search scope, so behavior will vary based on the directory you open in your editor
[1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/33030#issuecomment-51015...