In "linux embedded", absolutely. You take what's there. At some point I even had a debugging session through TeamViewer connected to a Windows machine which had Terraterm open connected to serial port of a linux box. Unfortunately, there was a lot of spam on the serial port, so even using vi was impossible, because the screen got garbled pretty fast. So I printed the files with cat, worked out a set of sed commands to get those files to the desired state and typed them back in. Crazy. But real.

(Add to that communicating with a guy on-site over notepad.exe. Mr. Robot vibes.)

Yes, because your sysadmins won't give you sudo, so you must scp a copy of nano into your home dir. Surprise, it's an AIX server running on Power, so your x86 nano won't run. Does building one from source count as hardship?

Usually not, sometimes very much so.