The problem with local dev, across a large developer org, is that it is local to each developer's machine. Which means that if there's some problem with it, tha

The problem with local dev, across a large developer org, is that it is local to each developer's machine. Which means that if there's some problem with it, that each developer has to spend time fixing it, or eventually end up going to IT or other devs and ask for help. And devs hate asking for help. The benefit of remote dev, along with standardizing on an editor, is that the company and IT department can say "here is a thing that works, use this one", instead of debugging weird issues on individual developer laptops. If you're IT and someone comes to you and says their mouse doesn't work, do you break out the screwdriver and open it up to try and fix their mouse, or do you just give them a new one that you know works, so they can get back to work while you look into the problem later. Local dev is great when you're at a small company and just starting out, no support, but once you're a software dev working alongside other software devs, most of whom are smarter than you, and then there's a whole other team of devs dedicated to your experience as a developer; local dev feels like a little folksy hometown sort of endeavor. Don't get me wrong, local dev has its place, and some things like writing firmware will always want that, but the industry's moving past it for big picture reasons.