Replit: The Bundling of Software Development

Is the basic idea of Replit, to host an IDE, as a way to make collaboration and deploying to the cloud easier?

I want to understand this better. Would this be about the same thing, as having a Linode instance, or EC2 instance, with an IDE in it. that you remote into and always have running?

If so, I can see how making this easier could be useful. It's hard for me personally to look past the middleman, but others might not have that issue, and it might be suitable for them.

This feels about the same as when people started using Blogger and eventually Geocities, and eventually Facebook to do something that could be done as a solo effort. The tradeoffs feel the same.