JetBrains makes money selling to corporate engineering orgs. In that context the incentives towards remote development environments are very strong. You can get a developer immediately productive (again) by restoring a golden image. Instead of paying engineers to optimize the build or write IDE plugins to index manageable subsets of the codebase, you can just throw power at it. Remote dev environments at my company have 96 cores. The monorepo builds in about a tenth of the time. Unfortunately I think it’s inevitable.

The only thing slowing it down was developer rejection of the austerity of vim and emacs. That’s changing now with VSCode’s in-browser and SSH Remote support. That’s the golden path now at my work. Although we still pay for JetBrains licenses, the JetBrains workflow is quietly and unofficially deprecated.

They have to do this to stay relevant. And I’m glad they’re doing it, because I want my JetBrains-level capabilities back. VSCode doesn’t come particularly close.