My vision is for this to be handled by things like remoteStorage, Solid, or (if you must) Google Drive. I find having control over your data and delegating access to various apps to be a nice flow when implemented well (see for example https://app.diagrams.net/).

It's not a silver bullet. For larger data you can't afford to download it every time. That tends to balance itself out though, because you don't really want to store huge data on your laptop anyway, so you're going to have to find a different solution for that anyway (such as using Jupyter). You can accomplish quite a bit with streaming + sampling, which is the crux of how all our apps work in iobio.

I guess the web first way of dealing with this would be to have the data online also, maybe even on the same platform. Then you could have things like: Look at visualizations of this dataset, at what people have done with this dataset etc.. And you could immidiately verify the results, assuming you trust the data.

it's gonna be slow and expensive.