Nano/vim/emacs/etc over a remote (SSH) terminal, remote VM, or remote session via other means (e.g. VNC/RDC/etc). People use Visual Studio itself remotely via VMs and RDC.

Yep, I use Remotix on a remote mac on my ipad pro. It works well mostly. When the bandwidth is not sufficient, it really drives one up a wall ofcourse...

When you spend 1000s of dollars to get the dev experience we had at the dawn of the age of computing lol

Yes :) Isn't modern computing excellent?

One quite significant difference though; portability.

Also not quite $1000s; $800 for the ipad (and a $400 one would do fine) and $20/mo for the mac. Beats a mbp most of the time in a modern 4g/wifi environment. Ofcourse there are many caveats; embedded programming, game programming, mobile app testing etc. But I still do about 60-70% (depending) on it; it's great for building / testing / deploying API's and some months that's all I do.

I think embedded programming would be possible once web browsers start supporting USB devices.

Or any editor/IDE via ssh -X (the window's show locally while the app runs on the server)