I'm guessing that VSCode has a distinct back-end and front-end. It's able to run the back-end server on the remote machine/container/whatever over a bog-standar

I'm guessing that VSCode has a distinct back-end and front-end. It's able to run the back-end server on the remote machine/container/whatever over a bog-standard SSH tunnel. Any autocomplete functionality, debugging, etc. will use the resources on the remote machine. It also does port forwarding for you. The front-end (GUI) runs on your local machine. A closer analogy would be using Plan9, and mounting most of your cloud machine locally. Vim would then just be your local front-end into those mount points. Containers/docker add the ability to share your exact machine configuration with someone else, and have them create their own copy of it with a single command. It would be almost like sharing a VM image with your team. There's been a lot written about the pros/cons of containers, but they achieve similar goals to VMs, and so-happen to bring a lot to the table in this scenario.