why? that screams "bad devops" to me

Being able to ssh <build farm> && tmux attach to reconnect to your development environment is powerful, especially when your testing environment consists of connecting to a number of different systems at once.

Examle, a persistent tmux session with splits on a big monitor, Vim/Editor in one pane with live-UT results in another and documentation/misc details (scratch?) in another kicked off as I save.

Once kiddo's go to bed I can simply 'tmux attach' from any machine with access and be up and running.

I use IDEs and Vim, but there is clear value to working completely inside the terminal.

The same reason IPv4, Unix, and unencrypted email are still dominating: it's good enough, and it's available everywhere, with no fuss.

Coding over SSH is just so convenient. It doesn't matter whether you're using a Raspberry Pi or a DigitalOcean VM.

When you're coding in vim, you're not losing all of your IDE and just getting vim. You're losing all of your IDE and getting all of the Unix userspace. Unix is a great IDE.

I can't stand editing more than a few lines on a VPS because of the latency and uncertainty. Some letters appear fast, others take a second or more, it's maddening.

I do all of my development on a remote box. All of my work is in a screen session, so I can always reattach to it. Since that box is a lot more stable than my Mac is, it doesn't take much effort to restore my workspace after OS X crashes. I also regularly leave builds and tests running while my laptop's asleep, and, because they're remote, they never cause my laptop to overheat and kick on its fan.