I don't think adding symlinks to / takes away a meaningful amount of time from the people working on drivers.
I think you're gonna have a hard time convincing people these days that the answer to all the scenarios you listed shouldn't just be "lol cloud", too. :/
Of course, the whole point is that my desktop is part of the network like any remote server. You are not a client of servers, you are a member of a network.
AFAIK, rdesktop and logmein are far behind (more difficult to setup and to use).
https://code.google.com/archive/p/win-sshfs seems dead.
AFAIK, docker does not work on windows home edition.
My scenarios are not made up. These are my very usual and simple use cases of linux. I do not know any windows user that do the same. Do you have a backup copy of your 1TB hard drive on the cloud ?
I'm not saying your scenarios are made up and I sympathize with them, but I think most people choose to store their stuff in the cloud so they don't need to worry about the devices they physically touch.
By education, I think mainly about the different way to use Linux compare to Windows.
Imagine you are traveling and need a file that is at home on your desktop PC. With your phone, you can wake up your PC, connect using ssh, convert the document to pdf and copy it to your phone.
Imagine you are visiting a friend and want to show something running on your PC, you wake up your PC, launch putty and a VNC client (portable applications) and you are at home.
Imagine you want to keep your machine lean and clean. With docker you can switch between images of preinstalled independent development environments. With sshfs, you access your remote website without a local copy.
Imagine you want to change the hard drive. I copy very quickly the very few files in my home directory that are not on NFS to a NFS backup directory. I change the disk, reinstall Linux then uses the small installation diary I keep on google drive to configure disk montages and to reinstall non default applications.