VMs, remote IDEs, or FAAS are ways to develop on a server-like environment, but they all come with their own overheads; IME none has as good a debugging experience as being able to run the thing directly on your normal dev machine. (even for sysadminly scripting tasks, working via a putty window carries overhead and there are times when you'd rather be on the machine itself, though I'd agree that it's less common for it to be an issue there than for development work).

You're right that the issue is consistency rather than the particular OS. But there is a real point here that Ubuntu in particular is functional as a first-class OS both on developer laptops and on production servers, in a way that none of the other options can quite match. (Windows' administration support/automation is lacking on the server, OSX servers barely exist, CentOS is outdated on the laptop, Debian is too principled to support laptop hardware, Fedora is undersupported on the server...). So it does make for a unique selling point for Ubuntu in practice.