> In an era of remote servers and web scripting languages, not every developer needs a full-blown workstation.

I haven't really found that to be the case, especially these days with "modern" frontend tooling, like Babel/Webpack/etc, static analyzers like ESLint/Flow/Typescript, and the various types of frontend testing. Every bit of performance helps.

You can debate whether all of that is necessary, but the reality is many companies use them.