But... you can ssh into a container and change state (depending on config options), can't you? I'm not sure I follow this response or the OP's complaint.

I mostly write python code and one very nice pattern I've found is to run a container somewhere (either locally or on a server somewhere) with an open port. You can SSH into it and use the remote interpreter as your main project interpreter. That way your dev environment is 100% reproducible. VS Code an Pycharm Pro both support doing that.