Dependency management is usually not a big part of programmer workflow (unless you are a devops or something). Download dependencies and docs, go offline, write code.

People who try working offline are exactly the people who want to do it without Stackoverflow.

They're also the people least likely to want to use this kind of setup in my experience.

My company has a remote VSCode setup not that dissimilar from this setup. Big C++ codebase. Many engineers love it, even some of the "old timers." Our interns can be productive on day one and it brings a lot of productivity to not have to worry about caring for your dev environment.

But there are plenty of people who really just want to SSH into a beefy desktop (or directly edit on that desktop) and use their vim/emacs setups. These are the people who know how the whole build stack works, can debug the vscode/codespace magic, and can do amazing things not available in the VSCode plugin library.

So it's good to be able to do both. Allow power users to use their own tools, but don't require everyone to be a power user to sit down and write some business logic. Give nice rails to ride but don't require them.

An internet connection is also required for fairly important things like pushing your code, giving and receiving code reviews, etc.