When I was still a consultant I spun up new VMs for each client engagement -- both macOS and Windows -- using Parallels. When the engagement was over I would dump that to an external HDD. It meant over-spending on my MacBook Pro to have the SSD and RAM space to support multiple VMs but there was never any question of client work corrupting my system (or vice versa) or needing to wipe and reload my machine after a client engagement.

Codespaces is great in my experience. VSCode devcontainers is another very similar approach that will keep it on your machine but at least containerize the development environment raising the bar fairly significantly for a rogue package to do serious damage on your machine.

You just do everything over ssh. It's one of the reasons everyone still like CLI/VT tools so much.