I prefer having a powerful development machine and install and use development environments natively. The only times I am prepared to use a (local or remote) VM

I prefer having a powerful development machine and install and use development environments natively. The only times I am prepared to use a (local or remote) VM is when the development environment cannot be installed on the OS of my development machine, or when I absolutely do not want to install those tools natively (because they might impact my main OS). I am often involved with multiple projects at the same time, but if those projects are set up well (and the toolset is decent), that does not cause any issues. In practice that means that developers always have to take into account that the project itself includes references to the specific versions of the tools that the project needs. And that those tools are -as-much-as-possible- installed in the context of those projects instead of in the context of the whole machine. A concrete example in node world is to use "nvm" and to always install tools locally in the context of a project instead of globally. In dotnet world, use global.json to specify the version of the tools you want to work with, install dotnet tools locally in the context of a project instead of globally. I have worked on projects where this is a problem. For example, projects that depend on hardcoded paths. Or projects that depend on hardcoded connection strings for a database. Or projects that do not use something like nvm to specify the version of node/npm they are compatible with. Each of those things is an issue with the setup of the project and is something that you will bump against when you try to setup a CI/CD pipeline for the project. Although, I agree that it can be useful to use docker containers with a correct version of the tools to create builds in a build pipeline. The reason that I prefer to develop natively is that it is faster, snappier and more enjoyable. I also believe that it is easier to diagnose issues and investigate performance. Aside from that, renting a virtual machine with the same performance as my development machine, would be a lot more expensive, and I would still have to deal with the lag. I am aware of recent changes that allow you to for example run a JetBrains IDE locally (similar to what VSCode already had for a long time?) that is connected with a remote headless version of the IDE. I do not have any experience with that kind of setup yet, but I assume that would remove most of the lag.