To me it feels more like going back to the way things used to be. Reminds me of when I used to do my work by pushing buttons on a Wang terminal in one state, and the PR1MEOS machine that I was actually working on was several hundred miles away.
Maybe as our work becomes more complex, it makes sense to return to thin clients.
The kicker is who owns the super computer you're dialing into, and how much of it you actually own. "Back in the day" it probably made sense for a company to maintain their own servers.
But now it's too profitable to not use amazon in most cases. It's nice not needing a server room, but hat suffers is ownership issues with infra and data, accepting the outages, and rolling with the crazy decisions amazon might make in the future that will effect your systems.
It works extremely well.
I would rather use my workstation's CPU & memory resources to actually compile the code rather than masking the complexity of moving that compilation process onto hardware which I do not own.
On the other hand, I'm worried it's going to be used to (attempt to) "take away" our ability to compile locally rather than giving us an amazing, immutable, local dev environment.