The main advantage I was thinking was less “I broke my machine and I need to rebuild it” and more “we had everything setup on our jump server but it wasn't documented and now we can't figure out how to rebuild it” or “someone — totally not me — forgot to clear out the admin credentials after they were done and didn't think about it since everything worked”. Ephemeral servers are a great way to keep people honest about things like that.
But it’s usually easier to trash a cloud IDE and create a fresh instance than it is to unknot a bad Python configuration on a local machine. (Although you can always use Docker or Vagrant)