Given the overall trend towards SaaS I expect tooling vendors to try to enforce this whenever they think they can get away with it. By working on or using these projects you're giving them more ammunition, even if your intentions are to just add another option.
> You don't think there's value in someone in a low-income situation being able to experiment with and use a full development experience without having to upfront invest in computing power?
And it's better that they get stuck paying rent to some cloud vendor just to access their editor?
I'm all for making stuff more accessible, but this is the same nonsense as FB's "Free Basics".
There's no reason that a browser based editor has to mean lock-in, and the current landscape doesn't support such gloom, in my opinion.
Have you tried any of this tooling? It's hard to notice that I'm not in VS Code at times. I'd be curious what you find so dystopic.