Unclear shell and environment for launching cmake command

[quicknir]

I'm working remotely on a computer where I cannot change the shell properly with chsh. As a workaround, I'm doing something along the lines of

zsh_path=...
if [ -x "${zsh_path}" ]; then
    export SHELL="${zsh_path}"
    exec "${zsh_path}" -l
fi

All my other environment changes, like modifying the PATH, and so on, are in my zsh startup files. For vscode generally, this seems to work correctly (for example: things are added to PATH to that I can spawn new shells correctly). My .zsh startup files also activate a conda environment. I can see that that environment is not active however when vscode-server executes cmake. If I simply directly activate the conda environment in my .bash_profile though, then it works fine. I was wondering if cmake-tools was maybe doing something that hard codes bash, or something like this, that could explain this?