Visual Studio typescript errors but webpack builds fine and no red squiggles in editor

Question

I'm getting many of the following errors when in the Visual Studio (not VS Code) Error list:

Cannot find module '../../dataStructures'. Did you mean to set the 'moduleResolution' option to 'node', or to add aliases to the 'paths' option?

Cannot find name 'require'. Do you need to install type definitions for node? Try npm i --save-dev @types/node.

(this is an old project which is slowly converting from javascript to typescript)

@types/node does exist in my node_modules and moduleResolution is set to 'node'. I don't get how I can add relative imports to a paths option

There are no red underlines in the editor and webpack builds just fine and the app runs

My tsconfig files (I have 4 .njsproj files) look like (basically, the paths are different for all of them but the rest is the same) this

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "module": "commonjs",
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "target": "es2016",
    "lib": [ "dom", "esnext.array", "ES2016.Array.Include" ],
    "noEmit": false,
    "downlevelIteration": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true,
    "types": [ "node" ],
    "sourceMap": true,
    "paths": {
      "common/*": [ "../common/*" ],
      "tools/*": [ "./clientTools/*" ],
      "dashboard/*": [ "../dashbaord/*" ],
      "xstream": [ "../../node_modules/xstream" ]
    }
  },
  "exclude": [
    "node_modules"
  ]
}

What am I doing wrong? Hoe can I get all these errors to go away.