Good for you, I guess? For me, regressing to having a round trip between a keypress and its result would be completely unacceptable. The speed of light in a vacuum doesn't change; paths are not getting significantly more direct; the improved index of refraction from switching to hollow-core fiber or low-orbit satellites could in theory help but is a one-time, limited improvement that has yet to be delivered to my fingertips. Having the network boundary in the correct place to account for the fundamental physics of the situation is the only real answer.

Winscp open file + copy back on write detect was very useful for local-speed relote editing 10 years ago. Only issue now would be no lsp.

Also using gold audio cables, I guess. Lets not let go aways of those Hz that hardly any human notices.

I mean you do get slower with age so maybe that could explain it - personally I get nauseous working on 30hz (was stuck on this in a BnB once because of an old HDMI dongle), and that's like best case scenario for internet latency without all of your local I/O and encode/decode overhead.

No they haven't done the job just fine. Remote X has always been a pain to set up, and slow. NX was much better but not free.

Remote VSCode is far better than any of those options. If you don't want to try it that's fine, but don't pretend you know better.

I do not remember anything particularly difficult to get X11 up and running remotely, other than the XAuth stuff which was annoying enough in hardened environments, although those have not been commonplace, and X11 tunnelling via ssh has automagically taken care of XAuth.

The ultimate deal breaker, however, is X11 not being proxied by corporate firewalls, even though the protocol is extensively documented and the source is available. But that is because RDP has won over, and demand for X11 has diminished.

But, yes, X11 prefers local networks with flat topologies, and the protocol is chatty (again, not as big of an issue anymore unless run over a mobile connection with a high latency, but the X11 protocol compression helps with that).

What was so complicated about configuring an environment variable, and investing into good tooling like Hummingbird?

It was never as simple as configuring an environment variable.