Keep your editor; move the machine

The objection to cloud dev environments is always the same: fifteen years of muscle memory in this editor, and no web IDE is getting it. So don't trade it. Mount the container's filesystem on your laptop: Finder and Explorer connect over SFTP through the SSH proxy, or over WebDAV from hoody-files: and it appears as a network drive. Your local VS Code, your vim, even Photoshop open the container's files directly.

Meanwhile the machine part happens on the machine: the dev server runs in the container, dependencies install there, and the app answers at its port URL for anyone you send it to. The laptop holds keystrokes; the container holds everything else.

The editor, it turns out, is the only part of the environment worth keeping local.