I don't get it. Theia runs on my home machine, my home cluster, or runs standalone just like any other editor. Everything I've mentioned are fully OSS projects (edit: GitPod has a bit of secret sauce for the workspace functionality, but Che has that, too). If anything, my goal in all of my software choices is user empowerment and I refuse to build or use anything proprietary or tied to a single cloud. My only exceptions are Plex (I'm working on replacing it) and Windows/games on a single machine.

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.