I have the same use case as you and went through exactly this. I ended up feeling that Pycharm’s implementation wasn’t really a suitable solution. Some others had mentioned the alternative of mounting the remote filesystem locally using SSHFS but I found that this created issues of its own. In the end I settled on using Syncthing to sync all of my folders and then just run a local instance of Pycharm (and VS Code) at either end (Ubuntu 20 desktop and Macbook Pro). I’m very happy with this setup so far and would happily recommend it.