Maybe not by a vscode plugin, but possibly by vscode itself.

One thing I've noticed about web IDEs I've used in the past, be it Nitrous, Cloud9 or others is that they start with the idea of web IDE and then they make it a good IDE.

VScode was first a good editor that everyone enjoys using and then it started moving to web. If at some point vscode becomes a fully integrated web IDE like repl.it or cloud9 I think it will sweep competition just because it has a massive number of desktop users

That would be my worry. VSCode for all its faults works well and is lightweight. Make VSCode tightly integrate with github, where you never even have the code locally, and can build and test via the IDE nicely... amazing, never even have to setup the environment or pull the code down.

I am temped to apply for their SRE role, but I have a fairly cushy role as is, so probably not.

That’s exactly what GitHub Codespaces provides: https://github.com/features/codespaces.

I think that they’re completely different things.

No need for VS Code with repl.it at all.

and/or VS code in the browser