I agree that laptops can’t always do everything, but many things can be done comfortably well. At a previous job, I had 32 GB of physical RAM and 20 GB of swap (thanks to 5-10 RAM-hungry JVM apps), and things were quite usable for standard dev workflows.
Yes. So does a VPN outage if you're using that instead. If your laptop gets chewed up by a lawnmower, it's also impossible to work.
Err, sort of. Beyond Corp isn't really one single service that can be running or down, it's more of an approach, a bunch of different pieces, etc. I haven't seen an outage yet, but I don't think it would look like "the VPN is down", probably more like "this web app thinks I'm logged out".
I do recommend reading the BeyondCorp paper, although it's been a long time since I read it.
I use a MacBook Pro. I just connect to the machine. We don't use a VPN (see BeyondCorp) but something like Tailscale would probably work well. The fact the machine is under my desk and not in a data center is due to my laziness in returning it, nothing more.
I'm using VSCode for mostly Java. It's not perfect, but I prefer it to JetBrains products. JetBrains products are more capable for now, but I think their new IDE does remote development, and VSCode gets more IDE-like all the time. I think that's the direction things are going.
I'm using a MacBook Pro because I've been using Macs my whole life and have too much muscle memory to switch to something else.
As for having a beefy laptop, that only goes so far. Right now laptops tend to top-out at 32GB RAM if you still want plenty of choice, you make sacrifices to get more than that. Also many companies have policies or regulation restricting what can be on laptops.