Yeah, this is basically what I do. One example: using neovim with bunch of plugins as a daily driver, but whenever I enter a server that doesn't have it nor my settings/plugins, it isn't a huge problem to run vim or even vi, most stuff works the same.

Same goes for a bunch of other tools that have "modern" alternatives but the "classic" ones are already installed/available on most default distribution setups.

Also that workflow of SSH'ing into a machine is becoming rarer. Nowadays systems are so barren they don't even have SSH.

Someone might have ssh access, just not you :) VPS' will still be VPSing, even though people tend to go for managed Kubernetes or whatever the kids are doing today. But if you're renting instances/"machines", then you're most likely still using ssh.

Ansible (system management automation) runs over SSH. So do a lot of other useful tools, like git, rsync, most everything from the "CharmBracelet" folks [1], and also anything you can port tunnel, so yeah. SSH is still useful to some of us out here. Personally, I do all my commandline stuff locally and manage remote stuff via SSH through various tools and scripting, so I get mostly the best of both worlds there. :)

[1] https://github.com/charmbracelet/

That's a cute thought not grounded in reality.

The infra may be cattle but debugging via anal probe err SSH is still the norm.

Technically, if your infrastructure is cattle, there ain't no debugging them. If one get sick, you destroy and replace.

At my organization, we run 1000-node kubernetes clusters. Technically, I can SSH into the worker nodes, which I verified during setup. Have never done it. When a node reports as unhealthy, k8s kills and replaces it, and I don't really care why it went unhealthy.

We have a few SSH "bastion" hosts used for proxying into various databases, but those are so locked down that no one besides my team has shell access.

For developers, they get Grafana for logs/traces and various tools they prefer, like AppSignal. If something is exploding in production, that's it. No shells, no `kube exec`. It was very painful at first, but now our software has great self-reporting built in, negating the need for local access for troubleshooting.