I'm guessing that VSCode has a distinct back-end and front-end. It's able to run the back-end server on the remote machine/container/whatever over a bog-standard SSH tunnel. Any autocomplete functionality, debugging, etc. will use the resources on the remote machine. It also does port forwarding for you. The front-end (GUI) runs on your local machine.

A closer analogy would be using Plan9, and mounting most of your cloud machine locally. Vim would then just be your local front-end into those mount points.

Containers/docker add the ability to share your exact machine configuration with someone else, and have them create their own copy of it with a single command. It would be almost like sharing a VM image with your team. There's been a lot written about the pros/cons of containers, but they achieve similar goals to VMs, and so-happen to bring a lot to the table in this scenario.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, that's a very good question. The short answer is yes*, plus some automation around spinning up a new session.

The wrinkle is that the display server is running on your local machine, and connecting to the thread of execution on the remote server. Vim doesn't really have that concept of separating view from control, but tmux does play a somewhat similar roll.