GitLab team member here - Sid shared a Twitter thread a while ago which has more insights into remote development environments and server runtime. [0]
At GitLab, there are open roles for "Server Runtime" in the incubation engineering team [1] [2] in case someone is interested in joining and building this together :)
[0] https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1400134840754733059
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/#op...
Remote development environments are becoming a thing. I've not really had a chance to explore this space a lot but I might.