Not the same. sshfs is acceptable if you only want to do basic file editing, but is unusable if you want to say use language services or search in your directory.

What you want is for basic text editing to run locally (to minimize latency) and heavy duty services (like language services or search) to run on the remote server where accessing a file only requires a file system call instead of a network call. Then, after gathering the required information it can send that over some kind of pipe to your text editor.

This is the workflow that VSCode has set up and it's very good. In many ways, even if you're used to vim, VSCode's setup is preferable to vim over ssh shell due to lower latency.

I would be happier if python Language Server would actually be better than the tool chain supplied by PyCharm, however they haven’t yet reached that level at all.

Yeah, it’s an efficient setup that doesn’t actually work because it’s lacking in features.