Since no one has put this reason out there: to have one's development OS mirror production[1]. IME, the "develop on Mac, break on Linux" problem is not uncommon, even with high level abstractions. Plus, things like docker are native.

This can be all done in a VM, of course. I personally like the remote server, especially since they can be spun up so easily with cloud services now.

[1] - Though sometimes that's impossible. I.e. embedded.